Search Results

It would appear that indigenous film production is likely to continue to expand in Scotland. Even if Scotland remains a small national cinema in global terms, it is to be hoped that it will carry on making a big impact globally. Whether it does or not, however, it seems probable that international film coproductions and location shooting will, because of the mutual benefit that Scotland's landscape brings to filmmakers from outside Scotland, the Scottish film industry and related industries like tourism. The increasingly blurry boundaries surrounding the category of ‘Scottish’ cinema require a reconsideration of Scottish filmmaking and filmmaking in Scotland inclusively, both in terms of its artistic and popular merits and in relation to an increasingly global context of production and distribution. Moreover, a brief survey of a few of the films not discussed in this book illustrates the variety of fantasy Scotlands that continue to exist and that have been created by filmmakers within, and from outside, Scotland, and the exploration of identities they facilitate.

This chapter examines how the growth of specialised Asian film festivals (e.g. Busan, Hong Kong, Udine) participates in the development of a regional Asian cinema. It also considers the rise of digital distribution and exhibition of Asian cinema through online streaming models such as Viddsee. The chapter explores how alternative circuits of distribution respond to and in turn precipitate different audience consumption practices as filmmakers continue to seek ways of making films that will cross national markets.

This chapter focuses on alternative models of cinema, which flourished beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and specialised forms of institutional support that emerged for independent film. The video market, in particular, became a crucial source of funding through cassette presales. At the same time, international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, London, Berlin, Toronto, Hong Kong and Pusan became an important showcase for raising public awareness of films produced outside Hollywood. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Gone With The Wind Plus Fangs’: Genre, Taste and Distinction in the Assembly, Marketing and Reception of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Thomas Austin, which examines the particular means by which film in the early 1990s was distinguished by a so-called ‘industrially motivated hybridity’. This describes the means by which film creates appeal not through any singular or unified style, but through promotional and conversational processes of fragmentation, elaboration and diffusion.

A Touch of Zen is one of the essential films of the Chinese-language cinema. It achieved a “double first”: it was the first Chinese-language film to win an award at the Cannes Film Festival, in 1975, and the first wuxia (martial chivalry) film to do so at an international film festival. In this detailed and concentrated study, this book shows why it considers A Touch of Zento be an essential film, and why it is Hu's masterpiece and how it is quite unlike other wuxia films that came before or after. It is also historically important in the modern development of the Hong Kong cinema as well as the Taiwan cinema. The book argues that its key significance is its subversive portrait of the female hero, and a concomitant sexual ambiguity infecting both the male and female protagonists.

This chapter details how, from the end of the World War I until the end of the silent era in 1927 (and beyond), Hollywood dominated the international film industry. The Hollywood studios reached their peak, both in their organisation and efficiency, and in the sheer quality of their product. But this quality was fed from both within and without. Part of the response to Hollywood dominance was for other film industries to develop and exploit their own distinctive features, ranging from English idiosyncrasy, through art films in Germany and France, to complete contradiction in the Soviet Union. The chapter discusses those cinemas which were part of an international industry dominated by commerce. Of the other European industries, the country with most material available on DVD is Germany, in particular the expressionist cinema. This has the advantage that the influence of its conventions can still be seen clearly in modern horror, one reason being the long shelf life of Nosferatu (1922), directed by F. W. Murnau.

This chapter examines Unheeded Cries, South Korea's official submission to the fourth San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) in 1960, which tells the story of postwar orphans in the slums of Seoul. It discusses the Berlinale, San Francisco, and Asian Film festivals that consistently invited South Korean films to their competition sections during the first half of the 1960s. It also mentions the occupied force's cultural representative, Oscar Martay, who promoted Berlin as the Western cultural showcase of the East. The chapter reviews how SFIFF was organized and managed by Irving “Bud” Levin, whose ultimate aim was to raise his profile to become an international-level figure. It elaborates the Asia Foundation's (TAF) attempt to use SFIFF to showcase non-communist and ideologically correct Asian films for mainstream American society.

In August 1929, British Talking Pictures released a part-talking feature called The Crimson Circle. This early British sound feature was a re-working of the German silent film Der rote Kreis (directed by Friedrich Zelnik in 1928). Recorded using a sound-on-disc process, the rejuvenated Crimson Circle had dialogue sections (directed by Sinclair Hill) interspersed within a synchronised soundtrack of music and sound effects devised by the Austrian composer Edmund Meisel, notorious for his propulsive accompaniment to the German release of Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1926). Neither the print nor the discs from The Crimson Circle are known to survive, but aspects of the lost soundtrack can be glimpsed from surviving documentary evidence and by comparison with Meisel’s extant film scores and soundtracks.

This chapter explores 1950s discussions of realism in India as catalyzed by what filmmakers and audiences described as the eye-opening experience of watching the three Italian neorealist films that were screened at the first International Film Festival in India, held from January 24—February 1, 1952. Specifically, it considers this festival’s impact, and its echoes in cinematic and journalistic discourse in the early 1950s. Within the discourse of realism, one can find a continuum of films ranging from mainstream studio products such as Footpath (Zia Sarhady, 1953) to hybrid independent and studio films such as Do bigha zamin (Two Acres of Land, Bimol Roy, 1953) to state-supported independent films such as Pather panchali.

This chapter elaborates on the different aspects of the international film festival circuit. The international film festival is the first curatorial phase in the process of global film circulation. A film festival is a specific kind of microcosm, an isolated setting where film producers, scouts, sales agents, distributors, exhibitors, press, and non-professional visitors gather, and so a leading international film festival is a special habitat of travelling films and spectators. It is simultaneously an individualistic search for satisfaction and a social gathering. The profile of the festival visitor is varied; it is possible to distinguish many subcultures in the festival crowds, such as fanatic film buffs, occasional visitors, cinephiles, and industry professionals. Therefore, the fundamental challenge for the film festival curator consists of getting the attention and dedication of these people during several days or a whole week or more, and in presenting an attractive programme.

This chapter recounts how Chinese cinema developed rapidly in the new era and how filmmakers were able to denounce the brutality of the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution. It details the beginning of China's Fifth Generation cinema as the first postwar film movement in China to place Chinese cinema on the map of world cinema. It also discusses how the late 1970s brought major transformations in the regional film cultures and industries, such as the Hong Kong International Film Festival, which was launched at the City Hall in in June 1977. The chapter refers to The Man from Hong Kong as the Australian film industry's first attempt to collaborate with its Asian counterparts in the early 1970s. It explains how the entire Filipino film industry had to struggle with the Philippines's first lady, Imelda Marcos, and her ambitious project, the First Manila International Film Festival.

This chapter discusses the IAH's well-publicized foray into the international film business, which can be considered a silver lining within the scandal-ridden depths of Munzenberg's commercial empire. European cinema was just coming into its own in the 1920s, the golden age of silent film, and fortunately for Munzenberg, the most vibrant production centers in postwar Europe were almost without question his own dual haunts, Berlin and Moscow. His acquisition of the German distribution rights for the avant-garde classic Battleship Potemkin was the most prominent coup for the IAH, which also brought German films to Russia and produced its own movies through its Soviet subsidiary, the celebrated film collective Mezhrabpom-Russ (M-Russ), which featured the talents of both renowned director Yakov Protazanov and Russia's most popular stage actor, Ivan Moskvin.

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.

This concluding chapter ties together the loose threads of the discussions in the preceding chapters. It identifies several key trends that have had a huge impact on the Asian cinematic industry, including the rising popularity of Japanese and Korean films at international film festivals and the development of a specifically East Asian film festival circuit. It explains how the presence of Hollywood remains a constant element in any national cinema and continues to be a factor in Japanese and South Korean film markets. It concludes that the fate of the directors featured in the present volume will go hand-in-hand with the cinematic environments in which they work. What the future holds for the Japanese and South Korean film industries is unclear, but for the moment the future still looks bright.

Using the example of contemporary Moroccan cinema, this epilogue contends that cinéma-monde is best approached as a subset of transnational cinema. Thinking through the transnationality of cinéma-monde offers a way to bring crucial cultural, linguistic, political and economic relationships into critical focus. The epilogue further argues that cinema has been transnational from its very inception, and that recent trends in production and circulation of film have made it virtually impossible to think or theorise cinema solely within the framework of the nation-state.

Acclaimed New Wave director Ann Hui held a preview screening of her film, The Way We Are, at the University of Hong Kong shortly after its premiere at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in April 2008. This low-budget feature deals with the quotidian lives of the residents of Tin Shui Wai, a satellite town in Hong Kong's New Territories near the border with the People's Republic of China. Ann Hui, however, takes an interest in the trials faced by the ordinary members of the community. This new film prompts a look back at Ann Hui's career, her interest in social issues, and her choice to work within Hong Kong commercial genres while attempting to remain true to a more personal approach to subjects often shunned by the mainstream film industry.

This introductory chapter provides a brief history of Aki Kaurismäki's career in film. Kaurismäki made his directorial debut in 1983 with an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. He followed up at a prolific pace, writing, directing, editing, and producing four more shorts and six more features by the end of the 1980s. His third feature, Varjojaparatiisissa (Shadows in Paradise, 1986), was selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in the spring of 1987 as well as for the Toronto International Film Festival later in the year. Subsequent films were selected for prestigious festivals, and since 1992, all of Kaurismäki's features have screened at the Toronto, Berlin, or Cannes film festivals. Nominations and awards received for The Man Without a Past (2002) secured the director's status as a leading figure in contemporary auteur cinema.

This chapter provides a history of representations of Sámi peoples in Norwegian cinema over the past century, from the various remakes of Laila to comedies in the 1960s and 1970s indigenous rights documentaries.  Mecsei  examines recent developments in film production and Sámi language policies through the opening of the International Sámi Film Center in Guovdageaidnu-Kautokeino, Norway. The chapter outlines the history of the emergence of Sami self-representational film narratives through an analysis of the fiction feature films of Nils Gaup, including his groundbreaking films Pathfinder (1987) and The Kautokeino Rebellion (2008). Mecsei traces the further development of the diversity of Sámi feature filmmaking in two very distinct films: Paul-Anders Simma’s Minister of State (1997) and Lars Göran Pettersson’s Bázo (2003).

This chapter focuses on Iris Barry's life as the war came to a close in 1945. Iris found herself confronted with a multitude of new challenges, including constant worries about money. Pressures for funding the Film Library, always stressful, were but part of the peculiar finances of the Museum as a whole. However, the entire Museum, its Film Library included, had long been dependent on too few patrons to be entirely viable. After its eight-year Rockefeller grant ran out in 1943, the Film Library came to be viewed as a sizable liability to the Museum. Overall estimate of the deficit for the period from 1935 to 1947 stood at $368,554. Clearly there was pressure for the Film Library to become more self-sufficient.