Search Results

The New Wave movement involved a rising science fiction (sf) avant-garde that sought to remake a genre traditionally inclined towards technocratic scientism and conservative narrative style into a more experimental, counterculturally savvy mode of writing whose perspectives on technological modernity had a subversive critical edge. This chapter examines the imbrication of the New Wave with contemporaneous sf cinema, highlighted by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but with a special focus on two low-budget films of the 1970s that have developed a cult reputation and had clear links, textually or tonally, with the movement: Dark Star (1974) and A Boy and His Dog (1975). These two works share not only ideological terrain but also a certain mode of cult reception with New Wave fiction, coming to constitute — along with Kubrick's sf films of the period, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange (1971) — a kind of New Wave cinematic canon.

The British New Wave is the name conventionally given to a series of films released between 1959 and 1963. Conventional approaches to these films place emphasis upon viewing them as a series, stressing their similarities, and using these similarities to include the films in broader debates about class, gender and/or ideology. This chapter defines a new approach in relation to British New Wave and demonstrates that one can fruitfully consider the detail of these films individually and discusses British New Wave based upon the idea of difference without continually re-emphasising their similarities. The innovation of this approach is also complemented by the position its subjects occupy within the history of British cinema. As their collective title suggests, the arrival of these films was marked by a similar sense of innovation. The innovation of a film such as Room at the Top was its engagement with a contemporary British social life, and the emphasis in these new films was on the relationship between a character's leisure time and their working life.

This chapter explores the relationship between the Italian neorealist and French New Wave movements, and suggests that their connection is “complex,” concocted out of similarities rather than direct linkages. It asks the following question: Can we assume that the influence of neorealism on New Wave directors lies precisely in the realization that it was neither new nor realistic, at least for a younger and restless generation?

While promoting contemporary new work from Korea, PIFF also strategically sought to bring new international attention to classic older films of the 1960s to the 1980s. Three Korean retrospectives—Korea's New Wave, Kim Ki-young, and Shin Sang-Ok—as well as other Asian-focused retrospectives helped establish PIFF as an influential agent of memory. Highlighting older Asian films also reinforced other political and social interests of the festival, and helped shape its emerging relationship with the global film industry.

The introduction contextualises the French New Wave's ambivalent relationship to the older arts with regard to cinema's wider struggle for recognition in the course of the twentieth century. Surveying the debates around medium specificity, cinematic 'purity' and 'impurity' from the classical avant-garde to the Nouvelle Vague, it addresses the French New Wave's complex discursive construction in relation to the more established arts. Reframing traditional studies of the French New Wave, it argues for an intermedial approach to illuminate this seminal movement of film history. The corpus, rationale and approach of the book are also introduced and clarified.

This chapter examines Jack Clayton's 1959 Room at the Top and concentrates on the film's opening sequences in order to achieve two related objectives. It explores in detail the ideas of the arrivals and new beginnings that these sequences bring to attention. It also demonstrates how these two ideas also allow us to overcome the way in which existing considerations of this film have tended to place unnecessary limits upon the interest and importance of Room at the Top's miseen-scène. Room at the Top offers far more than just a linear examination of one man's desire to get ahead. The film offers the opportunity for a more circular discussion of the many (potentially) conflicting concerns that new spaces and their accompanying experiences must inevitably generate. The film articulates its principal thematic concerns through a series of introductions. In Room at the Top, matters of (personal) mobility co-exist with the problem of social paralysis.

“Experiment and Experience” covers Joanna’s first years as a reviewer for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, under the editorship of Judith Merril, and her first post as a university teacher at Cornell, and discusses modernism in sf, Joanna’s role as interpreter of the British “New Worlds” writers and the American New Wave and her response to the protest movements and cultural revolutions of the 1960s (in the psychedelic “Modernist novel by a Star Trek fan”) And Chaos Died. Essays and stories (1968-1971) examined include the important “The Wearing Out of Genre Materials,” and autobiographical short fictions that foreshadow The Female Man and illuminate And Chaos Died.

This chapter first discuses the rise of Korean popular culture and its dissemination in Asian countries, known as the Korean Wave, or Hallyu. It characterizes the Korean Wave into roughly two major historical developments: the Hallyu 1.0 era (approximately between 1997 and 2007) and the Hallyu 2.0, New Korean Wave, era (mainly from 2008 to the present). Although these two periods share some common phenomena, they are dissimilar in their major characteristics, such as the major cultural forms exported, technological developments, fan bases, and government cultural policies. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the recent evolution of Hallyu in a socioeconomic context alongside its textual meanings. The chapter then discusses the hybridity in Korean popular culture followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter reconsiders the style and meaning of British New Wave cinema. The examination of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey or Billy Liar, is based upon the pressing desire to re-evaluate the mise-en-scène of these films. This has been achieved by applying the kind of British critical methodology, which first suggested that such an approach was unnecessary. The kind of style-based film criticism originally advocated by Movie is a useful tool for reconsidering the nature and the status of the series of films. Reconsidering the nature of each of these films is made possible by concentrating upon the details of each one and allowing a discussion of these details to develop a deeper understanding of each individual film. The implications of this are twofold. Firstly, it enables a clear demonstration that it is not the methodology that is at fault; it is just the way in which the methodology has (not) been applied. The strand of British film criticism which has developed is an impressive tool by which discussions of the British New Wave can be moved forward. The impressive nature of the methodology is further enhanced by the implications that such an approach has for other aspects of British cinema. Secondly, it is important to understand that examining the style and meaning of any individual film allows that film to have a position within any kind of broader framework.

This chapter considers Tony Richardson's contribution to British New Wave. Richardson's first film Look Back in Anger (1959), despite its faults, was important for the development of ‘a style to the purposes of the piece’. Look Back in Anger is an interesting film for many reasons. It represents the beginning of Richardson's efforts to establish a new and separate position within the British film industry. The film also helped to generate a new series of critical debates about the development of a British cinematic style, or the lack of it. The film also became allied with other films trying to do similar things, such as Clayton's Room at the Top. It can best be characterised by the extremity of shot scale deployed to show the claustrophobic relationship between Alison and Jimmy, and the construction of The Entertainer demonstrates a willingness to move out from this extreme proximity. Richardson's four films from this period need to be seen as indicative of a talent being developed rather than the achievements of a director at the height of his creative ability.

The redefinition of “Hong Kong” occasioned by the Handover coincided with the re-imagination of the city in other ways as well. Produced within this charged political context, Stanley Kwan's Hold You Tight mediates various local and global currents in queer cinema within Hong Kong screenscapes. Kwan redraws the line, yet again, between popular schlock and New Wave aesthetic experimentation. The film's New Wave auteur credentials are certainly hard to challenge. Hold You Tight won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival as well as the Teddy award for best gay/lesbian film at the festival. Set in Hong Kong and Taipei, Kwan solidifies an important regional link between Taiwan New Cinema and Hong Kong's “Second” Wave. The film offers the distinct vision of a cinematic auteur in addition to the common aesthetic and discursive currency needed to function in the international art film circuit as well as the regional market for Chinese-language cinema.

The conclusion sums up the findings of the book, taking stock of the role of the older arts in the New Wave'scultural legitimation. Drawing on Alain Badiou, it illuminates the New Wave's productive paradox: while positing film as art, the movement also asserted cinema's status as a popular medium better suited to reach a wide and diverse audience than the traditional arts. The conclusionfurthermore revisitsintermediality's function as both a mirroring device and a means to work through social and political issues.

The Infernal Affairs trilogy provides the illusion of an epic sweep (from 1991–2003) that covers the issues of government legitimacy, global capitalist expansion, individual alienation, and the implosion of a system that blurs “legitimate” political authority with an underground “illegitimate” economic reality. As part of the New Hong Kong Cinema Series, this short book attempts to highlight the significance of Infernal Affairs within the context of contemporary Hong Kong cinema as well as within global film culture by examining all three films in the trilogy. This analysis of Infernal Affairs concludes with a look at the trilogy's self-reflexive allusions to the mass media and the current state of Hong Kong film culture within a global context. In particular, the Infernal Affairs and the New Wave are discussed.

This chapter considers the cinematic medium as a confederate to the impasse of history. Gilles Deleuze develops two semiotics that explore a vast taxonomy of movement-images and time-images. He provides two theses for the transformation of the movement-image to the time-image. In the transformation of the movement-image into the time-image, it is not that the movement-image is replaced, rather it is as if it has been overcome, becoming a ‘first dimension’. Deleuze's images and signs of the cinema are ahistorical. It is mentioned that the movement-image is time as Chronos, the time-image is time as Aion. The reason why there are no films of the Japanese New Wave that investigate the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is then dealt. It is apparent that the movement-image presents no simple, single form of history. The beauty of the time-image is reflected by a beauty of the movement-image.

This chapter discusses the influence of French New Wave on new punk cinema. It presents an analysis of a new punk film that exemplifies the legacy of the New Wave at its best, Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También (2001). The film rejects the overheated, ‘crazy-love’ narratives of youth-oriented films, preferring a more contemplative, hesitant mood.