In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy offers an engaging overview of an important trend--the filmmaking of postcolonial, Third World, and other displaced individuals living in the West. How their personal experiences of exile or diaspora translate into cinema is a key focus of Naficy's work. Although the experience of expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, the films themselves exhibit stylistic similarities, from their open- and closed-form aesthetics to their nostalgic and memory-driven multilingual narratives, and from their emphasis on political agency to their concern with identity and transgression of identity. The author explores such features while considering the specific histories of individuals and groups that engender divergent experiences, institutions, and modes of cultural production and consumption. Treating creativity as a social practice, he demonstrates that the films are in dialogue not only with the home and host societies but also with audiences, many of whom are also situated astride cultures and whose desires and fears the filmmakers wish to express. Comparing these films to Hollywood films, Naficy calls them "accented." Their accent results from the displacement of the filmmakers, their alternative production modes, and their style. Accented cinema is an emerging genre, one that requires new sets of viewing skills on the part of audiences. Its significance continues to grow in terms of output, stylistic variety, cultural diversity, and social impact. This book offers the first comprehensive and global coverage of this genre while presenting a framework in which to understand its intricacies.

Incorporating more than one linguistic code or mode of expression in literary and artistic productions has quickly grown over the last two decades. This volume pays special attention to the dynamic rise of code-switching especially in literature and performative arts, and explores strategies used by contemporary artists to compose their multilingual narratives as well as moves beyond the linguistic level in the direction of multimodality. The innovative frameworks and descriptions intend to highlight the different ways in which art, unlike ordinary language use, manifests language mixing and switching. Besides the papers by both young and established scholars, the volume includes a section of valuable contributions from multilingual authors and artists to bridge the gap between academic approaches and creative professional practices.

Films examined include: Slap her she's French, Whale rider, Distant voices still lives, Babette's feast, The Magdalene sisters, It's a wonderful life, Pleasantville, American beauty, Brassed off, The full Monty, Billy Elliot, Calendar girls, School for seduction, My son the fanatic, East is east, Ae fond kiss, Yasmin, Lost in translation, Monsoon wedding, Last resort, Lilya 4-ever, In this world, Together, The idiots, Italian for beginners. Includes a filmography.

How is film changing? What does it do, and what do we do with it? This book examines the reasons why we should be studying film in the twenty-first century, connecting debates from philosophy, anthropology and new media with historical concerns of film studies. When the common frameworks for studying film - the nation, identity, representation, Hollywood industry - have ceased to yield explanatory power, how do we conceive of film's doings? In this fresh and innovative book, Janet Harbord argues that film no longer represents or stands in for particular cultures, but acts isomorphically, showing us how the world works. Film here is action, energy, matter, moving across space to forge connections, provide encounters, and create schisms in our knowledge of others. The book brings together key thinkers of the contemporary in an innovative exchange between film and theory. Marc Auge's concept of 'non-place' is brought to bear on, and disrupt, the category of national cinema. Manuel DeLanda's notion of morphogenesis frames an understanding of film as a process of constant evolution, in which the terms of change are immanent to matter itself. And the concept of inertia, from Paul Virilio's work, allows us to comprehend the different energies of film. Arguing that there is no higher position from which to view the present, either in theory or in film, we move blindly and yet with faith, discovering the present frame by frame. The Evolution of Film demonstrates how this is an intangible yet critical medium in the contemporary, mediating relationships to place, technology and thought itself. The Evolution of Film will be essential reading for students and scholars of film at all levels.

About social, historical and cultural aspects of cinema.

Victor Nunez writes and directs this noirish, Florida-set drama. Timothy Olyphant stars as Sonny Mann, an ex-con who is released early from a three-year prison sentence and returns to his home town in the hope of turning over a new leaf and putting the past firmly behind him. There he makes contact with his former best friend Dave (Josh Brolin), who is now a police officer married to Sonny's old flame Ann (Sarah Wynter). However, despite his resolution to lead a quiet life, Sonny soon finds himself in trouble once again as both his criminal past and his unresolved feelings for Ann catch up with him.

The 1930s was a turbulent decade across the world with the rise of totalitarian governments, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the start of World War II, and the constant migration of artists as part of evolving social, economic and political geographies that were marked by utopian dreams and devastating upheavals. This book approaches the 1930s and seeks to explore the microhistories that detail the movement of artists across borders, the potential transformation of artistic styles and the concurrent struggle to preserve old networks amidst the creation of new communities in often radically new contexts of artistic production. Touching on the works of Cartier-Bresson, Max Ernst, Miro, Picasso, and many more, as well as examining aspects of Surrealism, Abstraction, propaganda and photography, this is an insightful account of one of the most turbulent decades in the history of art.

There has been a significant surge in recent Argentine cinema, with an explosion in the number of films made in the country since the mid-1990s. Many of these productions have been highly acclaimed by critics in Argentina and elsewhere. What makes this boom all the more extraordinary is its coinciding with a period of severe economic crisis and civil unrest in the nation. Offering the first in-depth English-language study of Argentine fiction films of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, Joanna Page explains how these productions have registered Argentina’s experience of capitalism, neoliberalism, and economic crisis. In different ways, the films selected for discussion testify to the social consequences of growing unemployment, rising crime, marginalization, and the expansion of the informal economy. Page focuses particularly on films associated with New Argentine Cinema, but she also discusses highly experimental films and genre movies that borrow from the conventions of crime thrillers, Westerns, and film noir. She analyzes films that have received wide international recognition alongside others that have rarely been shown outside Argentina. What unites all the films she examines is their attention to shifts in subjectivity provoked by political or economic conditions and events. Page emphasizes the paradoxes arising from the circulation of Argentine films within the same global economy they so often critique, and she argues that while Argentine cinema has been intent on narrating the collapse of the nation-state, it has also contributed to the nation’s reconstruction. She brings the films into dialogue with a broader range of issues in contemporary film criticism, including the role of national and transnational film studies, theories of subjectivity and spectatorship, and the relationship between private and public spheres.