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Jerry White I
Could Read the Sky and an Irish Avant-Garde Jerry White is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta, President of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, and a member of the education staff of the Telluride Film Festival. He is co-editor (with William Beard) of North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 1980 and a regular contributor to magazines such as Cinema Scope (Toronto) and Dox (Copenhagen). |
Nicola Bruce's film I Could Read
the Sky negotiates traditions of both avant garde cinema and Irish cinema.
Neither entirely accepting nor entirely rejecting the realist model so important
in Ireland, it employs the visual essence of video in a way that many avant
gardists would find both familiar and troubling. Contrary to some criticicsms
of the film, this article argues that what we see here is not an abandonment
of politics, but a deepening of political analysis through the integration
of psychological considerations so important to many avant-garde filmmakers. |
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Liang Shi Fish and Elephant: The First Chinese Lesbian Film Liang Shi is Associate Professor of Chinese at Miami University, Ohio. He is the author of Reconstructing the Historical Discourse of Traditional Chinese Fiction (Edwin Mellen 2002). His articles, fiction, and reviews have appeared in such magazines as Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Dong Hwa Journal of Chinese Studies, Tamkang Review, Comparative Literature Studies, and The Vincent Brothers Review. |
Fish and Elephant (Jinnian Xiatian, 2001) may lay claim to being the first Chinese lesbian film. Homosexuality does not constitute a focal social issue in contemporary China, not because it is tolerated or accepted but because it is largely unrecognized. Social identity theory argues that establishing an individual's homosexual identity involves the recognition of homosexuality as a social category and the perception of emotional and value content associated with the category. In Li Yu's film, Xiaoqun's three confessions of her sexual identity represent the occasions when the category of lesbianism can become salient. The responses from hercousin, her male date, and especially her mother, however, all fail to activate the social category of lesbian, demonstrating its current inaccessibility in China. |
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Brad Prager The Face of the Bandit: Racism and the Slave Trade in Herzog's Cobra Verde
Brad Prager teaches German at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He has published articles on German literature and film in New German Critique, Seminar, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Art History. He is currently completing a manuscript about German Romanticism and the visual arts. |
This article examines Werner Herzog's film Cobra
Verde, with the intention of pointing out key differences between the
film and the book that inspired it. Herzog's work borrows a great deal from
Bruce Chatwin's novel The Viceroy of Ouidah but is selective in how
it frames and represents key historical moments. Highlighting the distinction
between Chatwin's and Herzog's approaches opens up a discussion of the cinematic
representation of the slave trade in relation to questions of race, German
identity, and the aesthetic impact of Herzog's uncommonly beautiful film.
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Festival Report Reviewed by Gerd Germünden |
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Reviewed by Wilfredo Hernández |
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