Rosalind Galt

Queer Cinema in the World

Proposing a radical vision of cinemas queer globalism, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt explore how queer filmmaking intersects with international sexual cultures, geopolitics, and aesthetics to disrupt dominant modes of world making. Whether in its exploration of queer cinematic temporality, the paradox of the queer popular, or the deviant ecologies of the queer pastoral, Schoonover and Galt reimagine the scope of queer film studies. The authors move beyond the gay art cinema canon to consider a broad range of films from Chinese lesbian drama and Swedish genderqueer documentary to Bangladeshi melodrama and Bolivian activist video. Schoonover and Galt make a case for the centrality of queerness in cinema and trace how queer cinema circulates around the globe–institutionally via film festivals, online consumption, and human rights campaigns, but also affectively in the production of a queer sensorium. In this account, cinema creates a uniquely potent mode of queer worldliness, one that disrupts normative ways of being in the world and forges revised modes of belonging.

Impossible narratives: the Barcelona School and the European avant-gardes

This article investigates the Barcelona School related to European leftist cultures of the 1960s, and in particular the intersection of critical theory with the political avant-gardes. Although the School’s films seldom left Spain, the movement offers a crucial exemplar of the European avant-gardes’ aesthetic and political impurity. The Barcelona School certainly lacks stylistic cohesion, but it has also been criticized as apolitical. This article argues that the School demonstrates an essential aspect of the European avant-gardes: by promiscuously combining forms, it speaks to (and from) the contested territories of European film culture. Theoretical debates on Marxism and culture linked the project of engaged cinema to the contested direction of the European left. And avant-gardist forms mixed uneasily with art cinema, exploitation genres and the global claims of Third Cinema. It is this rich mulch that accounts for the incoherence but also the complexity of the European avant-gardes. With its many international and multicultural links, the Barcelona School demonstrates the importance of the transnational to any understanding of European avant-garde film cultures.

It's so cold in Alaska: Evoking Exploration Between Bazin and The Forbidden Quest

In this narrative, only a few short steps separate the travel documents of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley to the nascent genres of documentary and ethnographic film. Exploratory films here form an Ursprung for the British documentary movement and the anthropological film, instantiating a relation to landscape space that would become a key element of non-fiction filmmaking. Bazin goes on to make an immediate geographical and significatory shift. He continues, “Not long afterwards, very likely because of the success of the Arctic films, a type of production appeared which we might categorize as ‘tropical and equatorial.’”2 This spa-

Claire Denis’s Capitalist Bastards

The films of Claire Denis consistently make global systems visible, and do so in ways that are seductively sensory. This article analyses Denis’s film Les Salauds as a queasily affective staging of contemporary capitalism’s gendered hostility. It draws both on politically engaged theories of contemporary cinema and on the insights of affect theory to understand the film’s close imbrication of financial control and sexual exploitation. Les Salauds is almost entirely set in Paris, but it refers outward to Denis’s earlier films of transnational circulation, using Michel Subor’s performance as a monstrous exploiter as a point of commonality. The article analyses the figure of the ‘salaud’ in French culture, reading Subor’s character Laporte through Sartre. It goes on to examine how the class qualities of the salaud seep beyond character and out across the film text. What emerges is a threatening mise-en-scène that evokes the hostile condition of contemporary capitalism in its articulation of time, space and affect. Gender becomes the focus for this hostility, where economic relations are played out across the body of Justine, the sexually tortured daughter. The article asks what kinds of resistance are imaginable in this oppressive milieu.

The prettiness of Italian cinema

Popular melodramas such as Cinema Paradiso (1988), Il Postino (1994) and Mediterraneo (1991) in many ways defined Italian cinema for international audiences in the 1990s: Cinema Paradiso and Mediterraneo won Oscars for best foreign language film and all the films found huge worldwide audiences. Il Postino, for instance, took over

The new European cinema: redrawing the map

21 million in the United States (Mojo, 2011) and over

Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories

80 million worldwide (Guru, 2011). In terms of the sheer volume of people who saw and enjoyed them, these films represent some of the most popular Italian films ever. Their generic location as melodramatic romances also places them textually as popular films and yet they don’t fit entirely comfortably into the rubric of popular cinema. The very fact of their international success ensured they were read by some as art film, connected by association with the modernist Italian films of the 1960s and 1970s, screened in urban arthouses and enjoyed by those audiences interested in foreign cinema. Their emphasis on visual style consolidates this generic location. Both textually and institutionally, the films hover between the arthouse and the popular. This tension, I will argue, opens up what I call the prettiness of Italian cinema.