Thursday, April 10, 5pm-7pm
Fiamma Montezemolo (California College of the Arts, San Francisco)
Traces (2012)
Fiamma Montezemolo will be screening Traces (2012) and more recent video work in progress that build on a long-term ethnography of the border—the linea—between Mexico and the USA. Her work is a reflection on the gesture of framing geopolitical and disciplinary territories through this contingent line. Traces is an experimental video-essay in which ethnographic research and art forms combine to create a meditation on the border life, as well as an attempt to sculpt a textured living portrait, a kind of biography, of the wall that separates Tijuana and San Diego. The recent work in progress is an ethnographic research on the after-life of selected art works that have been part of the border’s art scene in the last years. It highlights the procedures of intrusion at work in both Art and Anthropological ‘interventions’ as well as the deployment of the emblematic figure of fieldwork. Each artwork and its afterlife raises questions around social art, ethics, methods, collaboration, the city and its urban cycles, and the future of public sculpture.
Friday, April 11, 2pm-5:30pm
Bliss Cua Lim (University of California, Irvine)
A Pan-Asian Cinema of Allusion? Going Home and Dumplings
Going Home (dir. Peter Ho-Sun Chan, 2002) and Dumplings (dir. Fruit Chan, 2004) originated as episodes in the anthology franchise Three and Three...Extremes. Eschewing the "effacement of cultural nationalism" that Stephen Teo incisively identifies as a hallmark of pan-Asian filmmaking, Going Home and Dumplings conspicuously foreground culturally and historically embedded allusions to traditional Chinese medicine (zhongyi), Maoist and post-socialist Chinese history, and bilingualism (Cantonese and Mandarin, or putonghua) in narratives about physicians from mainland China who migrate to Hong Kong. Given the intense focus on cultural specificity demanded by the pronounced bilingual orality of both films and their allusions to traditional Chinese medicine and China's socialist history, what role do culturally and historically embedded allusions play in deracinative address of pan-Asian filmmaking? What is the place of local, culturally- and historically-rooted obsessions in the attempt to appeal to translocal audiences? This paper suggests that the tension between pan-Asian cinema's attempt to address a broad audience through tactics of deracination on the one hand, and culturally and historically rooted references, on the other, are contradictions internal to the workings of a nascent pan-Asian cinema of allusion exemplified by Going Home and Dumplings.
Bhaskar Sarkar (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Grounding the Global: Malegaon Video Comedies
Focusing on the Malegaon video "industry" located two hundred miles northeast of Bombay, and known for its hilarious and incisive spoofs of Bollywood and Hollywood hits, this paper seeks to develop a framework of "plasticity" to think about a localized apprehension of the global. With their DIY aesthetic, camp panache and biting humor, the videos lampoon the promises of globalization even as they buy into it. Plasticity is offered as a way to conceptualize the global-local as a set of relationalities in conditions of chronic mutability.
Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University)The Two (additional) Muses-Testament and the Akomfrah Project (The Archeology of Becoming)
Aboubakar Sanogo's paper will look at the figure of John Akomfrah as a signifier of a certain “Afro-transnationalism” in the cinema as he could be considered a point of encounter of multiplicity of discourses around the transnational, ranging from the theoretical to the diasporic, engaging with questions of locational specificity and transcendence at once, invested in a profound “cineclectics” that is both ethically collective and openly auteurist.
Saturday, April 12, 10am-1pm
Tarek Elhaik (San Francisco State University)
A Bloc of Sensation In Lieu of Geography
Building on a long walk taken last year around the Glauber Rocha Center in Salvador de Bahia, the essay meditates on untimely forms of the image and post-nationalist modes of curation. By creating a specific category of the image I have come to call "the incurable-image," the essay problematizes humanist and militant cine-geographies as well as current misunderstandings generated by Deleuze and Guattari's geo-philosophical approach to art and media culture. The paper is part of an ongoing research project between anthropology, curation, and visual culture hinged on Gilles Deleuze's post-humanist ontology of sensation.
Peter Limbrick (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Modernism, Film Culture, and Moroccan Short Cinema
Well before the commercially-oriented films of the "new Moroccan cinema," the subject of recent attention from scholars oriented around francophone studies, came a cadre of films that has been seldom seen and even more rarely theorized and discussed. In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Moroccans working under the auspices of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain and collaborating across a range of production roles (they were variously directors, editors, and writers on each other's films) created films like Six et Douze (dir. Bouanani, 1968), Tarfaya, ou la marche d'une poète (Bouanani and M.A. Tazi, 1966), Retour en Agadir (dir. Mohamed Afifi, 1967) and Le forêt, by Rechiche Majid (1970). These works and others like them--all court métrages (short films) and documentaries--often combined a modernist aesthetic with deep respect of popular local practices in rural Morocco as well as in cities like Casablanca.
This paper asks how we might account for these politically charged and intellectually-driven films within the context of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and "post-" colonial public sphere that was nationalistically oriented yet inflected by movements and debates outside of Morocco. In thus addressing the fertile work of the 1960s and 1970s, I provide a perspective that differs from the dominant Moroccan (and non-Moroccan) critical accounts, displacing the centrality of nationalism in arguments about modernity and film culture by relocating short film and documentary experimentation within a transnational political frame.
Kay Dickinson (Concordia University)
One Hand: Archive as Global Activism
What is the potential for moving image archives to function as – rather than simply document – activism? The footage-collecting practices of the recent and on-going Arab revolutions serve as a means of beginning to answer to this question, with their accent on egalitarianism and open or online availability that often exceed the ownership claims and exclusivity of many archives’ modus operandi. Rather than simply laud these principles, it is vital to chart how such material travels along particular transnational and internationalist pathways. How its production and exchange manifests permanent revolution through specific iterations of education, mobilization, collaboration and solidarity across borders. The solid work expended to achieve, maintain, perpetuate, learn from and transfigure through these archives, above and beyond the objects they might also catalogue and shelter, will be of central concern here, so integral are the global injustices of labour to international struggles for freedom.
Saturday, April 12, 2:30pm-5:30pm
Mariano Mestman (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
The transnational cultural flows and the South-South film movements around 1974.
The Rencontres Internationales pour un Nouveau Cinema took place in Montreal in June 1974. This two-day event brought together several key actors in the political cinema movements of the 60’s and 70’s including filmmakers, political cinema groups, historians, producers and distributors from Latin America, Africa and the First World. The Montreal encounters had the audacious and ambitious objective of creating and strengthening links among politically committed cinemas that grew out of the 1968 cultural climate and emerging Third World cinemas.
In his presentation Mestman will discuss the centrality of the Montreal Encounters to better understand the transnational circulation and connections among political cinemas worldwide. He will focus on two key moments within the Encounters: the discussions around the NFB’s Challenge for Change/ Société Nouvelle program and its transnational links with similar initiatives; and the difficult situation faced by Latin American filmmakers in exile (Chileans, Uruguayans, Brazilians and Bolivians) and under totalitarian national regimes (Argentinians, Peruvians, Panamanians), whose participation has largely been unaccounted for in most New Latin American Cinema historiographies.
Masha Salazkina (Concordia University)
Tashkent ’68: a Cinematic Contact Zone
Largely forgotten now, the Tashkent International Festival of Asian, African and Latin American Cinema (1968-1988) was a major venue for international exchange among the filmmakers and critics from the non-aligned Third World, as well as the politically engaged artists worldwide, and a unique screening space for World Cinema in the 1960s-1980s.
This paper offers an account of the first edition of the festival (1968) as the most visible link in the Third-World filmmakers’ and Soviet cultural bureaucracies’ ambitious but now-forgotten effort to construct a Third-World cinematic field that could compete against Hollywood or West European cinema’s global domination in the realm of both aesthetics and distribution, while at the same time connecting this ambition to Soviet cinema’s own agenda of cultural colonialism.
Viewed in retrospect, the festival puts into relief the often conflicting ideological agendas and geopolitical formations that typify the global film festival phenomenon of the Cold War era, as well as prefigure some of the more contemporary developments on the world film festival scene.
Fiamma Montezemolo (California College of the Arts, San Francisco)
Traces (2012)
Fiamma Montezemolo will be screening Traces (2012) and more recent video work in progress that build on a long-term ethnography of the border—the linea—between Mexico and the USA. Her work is a reflection on the gesture of framing geopolitical and disciplinary territories through this contingent line. Traces is an experimental video-essay in which ethnographic research and art forms combine to create a meditation on the border life, as well as an attempt to sculpt a textured living portrait, a kind of biography, of the wall that separates Tijuana and San Diego. The recent work in progress is an ethnographic research on the after-life of selected art works that have been part of the border’s art scene in the last years. It highlights the procedures of intrusion at work in both Art and Anthropological ‘interventions’ as well as the deployment of the emblematic figure of fieldwork. Each artwork and its afterlife raises questions around social art, ethics, methods, collaboration, the city and its urban cycles, and the future of public sculpture.
Friday, April 11, 2pm-5:30pm
Bliss Cua Lim (University of California, Irvine)
A Pan-Asian Cinema of Allusion? Going Home and Dumplings
Going Home (dir. Peter Ho-Sun Chan, 2002) and Dumplings (dir. Fruit Chan, 2004) originated as episodes in the anthology franchise Three and Three...Extremes. Eschewing the "effacement of cultural nationalism" that Stephen Teo incisively identifies as a hallmark of pan-Asian filmmaking, Going Home and Dumplings conspicuously foreground culturally and historically embedded allusions to traditional Chinese medicine (zhongyi), Maoist and post-socialist Chinese history, and bilingualism (Cantonese and Mandarin, or putonghua) in narratives about physicians from mainland China who migrate to Hong Kong. Given the intense focus on cultural specificity demanded by the pronounced bilingual orality of both films and their allusions to traditional Chinese medicine and China's socialist history, what role do culturally and historically embedded allusions play in deracinative address of pan-Asian filmmaking? What is the place of local, culturally- and historically-rooted obsessions in the attempt to appeal to translocal audiences? This paper suggests that the tension between pan-Asian cinema's attempt to address a broad audience through tactics of deracination on the one hand, and culturally and historically rooted references, on the other, are contradictions internal to the workings of a nascent pan-Asian cinema of allusion exemplified by Going Home and Dumplings.
Bhaskar Sarkar (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Grounding the Global: Malegaon Video Comedies
Focusing on the Malegaon video "industry" located two hundred miles northeast of Bombay, and known for its hilarious and incisive spoofs of Bollywood and Hollywood hits, this paper seeks to develop a framework of "plasticity" to think about a localized apprehension of the global. With their DIY aesthetic, camp panache and biting humor, the videos lampoon the promises of globalization even as they buy into it. Plasticity is offered as a way to conceptualize the global-local as a set of relationalities in conditions of chronic mutability.
Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University)The Two (additional) Muses-Testament and the Akomfrah Project (The Archeology of Becoming)
Aboubakar Sanogo's paper will look at the figure of John Akomfrah as a signifier of a certain “Afro-transnationalism” in the cinema as he could be considered a point of encounter of multiplicity of discourses around the transnational, ranging from the theoretical to the diasporic, engaging with questions of locational specificity and transcendence at once, invested in a profound “cineclectics” that is both ethically collective and openly auteurist.
Saturday, April 12, 10am-1pm
Tarek Elhaik (San Francisco State University)
A Bloc of Sensation In Lieu of Geography
Building on a long walk taken last year around the Glauber Rocha Center in Salvador de Bahia, the essay meditates on untimely forms of the image and post-nationalist modes of curation. By creating a specific category of the image I have come to call "the incurable-image," the essay problematizes humanist and militant cine-geographies as well as current misunderstandings generated by Deleuze and Guattari's geo-philosophical approach to art and media culture. The paper is part of an ongoing research project between anthropology, curation, and visual culture hinged on Gilles Deleuze's post-humanist ontology of sensation.
Peter Limbrick (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Modernism, Film Culture, and Moroccan Short Cinema
Well before the commercially-oriented films of the "new Moroccan cinema," the subject of recent attention from scholars oriented around francophone studies, came a cadre of films that has been seldom seen and even more rarely theorized and discussed. In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Moroccans working under the auspices of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain and collaborating across a range of production roles (they were variously directors, editors, and writers on each other's films) created films like Six et Douze (dir. Bouanani, 1968), Tarfaya, ou la marche d'une poète (Bouanani and M.A. Tazi, 1966), Retour en Agadir (dir. Mohamed Afifi, 1967) and Le forêt, by Rechiche Majid (1970). These works and others like them--all court métrages (short films) and documentaries--often combined a modernist aesthetic with deep respect of popular local practices in rural Morocco as well as in cities like Casablanca.
This paper asks how we might account for these politically charged and intellectually-driven films within the context of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and "post-" colonial public sphere that was nationalistically oriented yet inflected by movements and debates outside of Morocco. In thus addressing the fertile work of the 1960s and 1970s, I provide a perspective that differs from the dominant Moroccan (and non-Moroccan) critical accounts, displacing the centrality of nationalism in arguments about modernity and film culture by relocating short film and documentary experimentation within a transnational political frame.
Kay Dickinson (Concordia University)
One Hand: Archive as Global Activism
What is the potential for moving image archives to function as – rather than simply document – activism? The footage-collecting practices of the recent and on-going Arab revolutions serve as a means of beginning to answer to this question, with their accent on egalitarianism and open or online availability that often exceed the ownership claims and exclusivity of many archives’ modus operandi. Rather than simply laud these principles, it is vital to chart how such material travels along particular transnational and internationalist pathways. How its production and exchange manifests permanent revolution through specific iterations of education, mobilization, collaboration and solidarity across borders. The solid work expended to achieve, maintain, perpetuate, learn from and transfigure through these archives, above and beyond the objects they might also catalogue and shelter, will be of central concern here, so integral are the global injustices of labour to international struggles for freedom.
Saturday, April 12, 2:30pm-5:30pm
Mariano Mestman (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
The transnational cultural flows and the South-South film movements around 1974.
The Rencontres Internationales pour un Nouveau Cinema took place in Montreal in June 1974. This two-day event brought together several key actors in the political cinema movements of the 60’s and 70’s including filmmakers, political cinema groups, historians, producers and distributors from Latin America, Africa and the First World. The Montreal encounters had the audacious and ambitious objective of creating and strengthening links among politically committed cinemas that grew out of the 1968 cultural climate and emerging Third World cinemas.
In his presentation Mestman will discuss the centrality of the Montreal Encounters to better understand the transnational circulation and connections among political cinemas worldwide. He will focus on two key moments within the Encounters: the discussions around the NFB’s Challenge for Change/ Société Nouvelle program and its transnational links with similar initiatives; and the difficult situation faced by Latin American filmmakers in exile (Chileans, Uruguayans, Brazilians and Bolivians) and under totalitarian national regimes (Argentinians, Peruvians, Panamanians), whose participation has largely been unaccounted for in most New Latin American Cinema historiographies.
Masha Salazkina (Concordia University)
Tashkent ’68: a Cinematic Contact Zone
Largely forgotten now, the Tashkent International Festival of Asian, African and Latin American Cinema (1968-1988) was a major venue for international exchange among the filmmakers and critics from the non-aligned Third World, as well as the politically engaged artists worldwide, and a unique screening space for World Cinema in the 1960s-1980s.
This paper offers an account of the first edition of the festival (1968) as the most visible link in the Third-World filmmakers’ and Soviet cultural bureaucracies’ ambitious but now-forgotten effort to construct a Third-World cinematic field that could compete against Hollywood or West European cinema’s global domination in the realm of both aesthetics and distribution, while at the same time connecting this ambition to Soviet cinema’s own agenda of cultural colonialism.
Viewed in retrospect, the festival puts into relief the often conflicting ideological agendas and geopolitical formations that typify the global film festival phenomenon of the Cold War era, as well as prefigure some of the more contemporary developments on the world film festival scene.