Edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, Oxford University Press, 2010

Reviewed by Raluca Iacob

Global Art Cinema proves to be a daring project, aiming to discuss the rather ambiguous concepts of ‘global’ and ‘art cinema’. The possible scope of the subject and the difficulty of establishing exactly what either ‘global’ or ‘art cinema’ is, present a rather daunting prospect. However, this edited collection deals with the difficulty quite admirably.

Built on the accumulation of previous scholarship on art cinema, it references the work of, among others, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Steave Neale. Writing on art cinema was concerned mostly with Western post-war films, but Galt and Schoonover note that art cinema is not an obsolete subject, and its study is able to distinguish and reveal aspects of cinema which might be otherwise overlooked. As the editors write in the Introduction, the ‘mongrel identity’ of art cinema should be used to ‘explore central questions’ relevant to current film scholarship.

What the book intends to do is recalibrate the idea that art cinema discussions should be centred on the Western European-North American exchanges, for the most part ignoring contributions from other geographical spaces. Therein lies both its strength and its weakness; the book attempts to cover a rather large area—both geographically and temporally—and enriches our knowledge and understanding of art cinema that doesn’t necessarily fit into mainstream cinema, but no matter how comprehensive and all-inclusive it attempts to be, there will always be aspects of the topic which will be overlooked.

The various essays in the book are interrelated, as the contents of an essay on the film festivals can be read in connection with chapters on the European art cinema (of Werner Herzog, Claire Denis or the Dardenne Brothers); or between the international reception of ‘pink films’ and bisexual representations in art cinema. One of these essays, authored by Mark Betz, “Beyond Europe: on parametric transcendence”, looks at art cinema not as it has been associated in recent years with film festivals, but rather as a continuation, or a reversal, to modernism; a modernism which is constituted on the parametric qualities of these films defining and delimiting the field of art cinema. By critically engaging with the previous work of David Bordwell, in his description of parametric narrative, Betz is proposing a widening of the area of potential objects of study to include more than a select few of Euro-centric filmmakers and their films. In a counter-balancing article Azadeh Farahmand writes about the relationship between art cinema (especially in the context of national cinema—with a special focus on Iranian cinema) and film festivals. The value of the festival circuit to the dissemination of non-mainstream, art films is of paramount importance. Though limited in the focus of this article (as it discusses only Iranian cinema), the observations can be adapted and modified with the case of other national cinemas. In another article, David Andrews (“Towards an inclusive, exclusive approach to art cinema”) tries to (re)define the elusive concept of art cinema through the perspective of a theoretical framework, a daunting task and one which cannot be fully covered in one article, however—like the rest of the book, it provides a good starting point for further consideration, and more detailed and in-depth analysis.

The concept of global is not necessarily associated with the idea of geographical identities. The book doesn’t focus especially on any geographical spaces, but rather looks at art films as representatives of a ‘language of cinema’ that crosses borders and languages. For that reason, the book is not structured in a form which would indicate a specific geographical direction—the structure of the book follows issues of concern for contemporary art cinema: from the poetic nature of art films, to the growth of the pink film movement, and from the films of the sub-Saharan region to art cinema classics. This diversity is instrumental in positioning art cinema in the larger frame of an art form accessible to all, distancing it from the rather elitist perspective generally associated with the idea of art cinema.

Global Art Cinema is an intriguing read. The essays are well-researched, and present a diversity of styles, some leaning towards a more theoretical, conceptual or historical analysis, while other focus on specific films and filmmakers and the aesthetics of the art film image. It is both enjoyable and thought-provoking, providing a strong introduction to art films.

By Marilyn Ann Moss, University of Kentucky Press, 2011

Reviewed by Fredrik Gustafsson

Too many books written about Hollywood filmmakers make the claim that their particular
director had an unusual amount of freedom when making his films. This is based on the
assumption that in Hollywood directors were uniquely constrained and controlled, by the
studios and the producers. This is a rather general statement. In Hollywood there were
many different agreements and arrangements, depending on the individual director and on
the studio, and the status of filmmakers changed all the time. The argument also makes
Hollywood out to be more unique in its system than it actually was. It is a credit to Marilyn
Ann Moss that she never makes this argument in her new book Raoul Walsh: The True
Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director. Walsh is a good example of the complexities of the Hollywood system, which Moss’s book reflects.

Walsh was born in 1887 and lived to be almost 100 years old. He began directing around 1914, under the auspices of D.W. Griffith and his first important film is Regeneration (1915). That film already has the characteristic drive and verve of Walsh’s direction, while also having some connections with Walsh own life. He was quickly established as a first-rank director but it was when he joined Warner Bros. in 1939 that he entered his artistically most interesting phase. The first great film if this phase was The Roaring Twenties (1939) and for little over 10 years Walsh was at the peak of his career. He continued to direct until 1964 but the later output is much more varied in quality and interest.

Although Walsh was never given an Academy Award for direction he was held in high esteem by established critics (such as James Agee, Andrew Sarris and Manny Farber) and fellow filmmakers (Ingmar Bergman was a fan). But there have not been much coverage or analysis of his life and work in full, so for that reason alone, Moss’s book is a welcome contribution to the field of cinema studies. Since it is extensively researched, it will also be an invaluable reference point for future studies of Walsh work. Such studies are still needed, because Moss’s book is somewhat dissatisfying. Three primary problems with the book are its tendency towards repetition, some factual errors, and a lack of ambition when it comes to analysing the films.

Moss does write about Walsh’s characters, how these characters share similar traits and how many of them are close to Walsh himself (she mentions how Errol Flynn would often play his parts as if he was playing Walsh), but with such a visually gifted, and visually-centred filmmaker, it is a shame that she pays so little interest to his work with the camera. Moss does quote second unit director Ridgeway Callow as saying “he [Walsh] had a way, an absolute knack of placing the camera in the right position” and this is true, but little is said on how he worked with the camera, and where he placed it. Walsh’s use of deep focus is one of the most advanced in film history, and he developed his particular way of shooting in the silent era. With his use of depth and his dislike of studio settings, he was one of the most Bazinian of filmmakers, and this long before William Wyler or the neorealists were making films. I would have liked to have read more about these aspects of his work.

Despite these problems the book is still a worthwhile addition to the (all too small) body of work on Walsh. Moss went through archives, talked to survivors, and read memos, letters, reviews, interviews and autobiographies. The scope of this research is the book’s lasting achievement. Walsh was a boisterous and engaging character, and the book does make him come alive. After finishing this book, it is hard not to miss him.

Edited by Felicia Chan, Angelina Karpovich and Xin Zhang, Palgrave MacMillan, 2011

Reviewed by Andrew Dorman

Given the deluge of material currently available on the subject of Asian cinema, the arrival of any new publication in the field of Asian media studies is invariably greeted with questions of whether there is a need for yet another edited volume. Not only have Asian cinema studies been plentiful in recent years, there have also been numerous efforts to rethink the concept of Asian cinema in terms of modern globalisation and the transnational. Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide (ed. Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham, 2006), East Asian  Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai, 2008) and Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema (ed. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, 2009) have all made excellent contributions to the scholarly recontextualisation of Asian cinema, while Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic (ed. Koichi Iwabuchi, Stephen Muecke and Many Thomas, 2004) has negotiated the interdisciplinary links between film and television in relation to globally-circulated Asian media.

Genre in Asian Film and Television shows that there is still a need for this kind of study by demonstrating ways in which multiple Asian cinemas can be discussed collectively without losing sight of cultural specificity. However, this study tends to be overly broad in its scope, criss-crossing between an array of subjects including Japanese animation, televised theatre in Bali, Tamil cinema, the Hindi horror films of the Ramsay brothers and the work of Japanese director Seijun Suzuki to name but a few of the featured case studies.

The volume demonstrates an awareness of the complexities engendered in the study of such a broad and loosely-defined category as Asian film. In their introduction, Felicia Chan and Angelina Karpovich outline ways in which Asian film and television can be discussed collectively in terms of genre and specifically how genre operates under different historical, political and cultural conditions. (5) The book is structured into three sections – non-fiction genres, mainstream genres and genre and cross-cultural representation. This last section is particularly strong within the study and features a key contribution – ‘East Asian Pop Culture’ – by Chua Beng Huat, a chapter that addresses cross-cultural interactions of production, representation and reception outlined by Chan and Karpovich. Chua convincingly argues for the existence of a pan-East Asian pop culture industry that has emerged in light of American mass-entertainment hegemony. Taking into account flows of television dramas and to some extent film and music, Chua identifies a criss-cross of regionally-produced pop culture that has constituted a ‘routine consumer culture’ across East Asia:

Side by side with American pop culture, in every major urban centre in East Asia…there are dense flows of pop culture products from same centres into one another, although the directions and volumes of flows vary unevenly amongst them. (224)

Yet while Chua underlines the establishment of a pan-East Asian pop culture based around a collective consumerism, he also maintains the central position of ‘foreignness’ and thus cultural difference in pop culture consumption, whether discussing Korean television dramas popular in Japan or political opposition in China targeted towards the popular Taiwanese singer Chang Hui Mei.

Chua also looks at how the foreign is both ‘domesticized’ in the form of dubbing and ‘preserved’ as a culturally-distant spectacle. However, despite this, the transnational circulation of television seems to generate a collective ‘we-feeling’ among spectators, a level of audience identification based on ‘being human’ which Chua suggests results in a more regionalised identity:

A less inclusive mode of identification than ‘humans/ anyone’ takes the form of ‘I’ identity with the character because we are ‘Asians’, which ideologically also says ‘we are not like non-Asians’. This generates and affirms a sense of ‘Asian-ness’, despite cultural differences between the production and consumption locations, and may be a manifestation of what is conceptualized as ‘cultural proximity. (233)

It is on this basis, Chua argues, that a desire for a pan-Asian identity is based through the consumption of popular culture products. (233)

Cobus van Staden looks closer into the appeal of the ‘foreign’ in his analysis of the anime series Arupusu no Shoujo Haiji/ Heidi, a Girl of the Alps (Isao Takahara, 1974, Jap) and the Japanese representation of Europe through animation. Viewing anime as a globalised cultural phenomenon, van Staden emphasises the role of exoticism in global, cross-cultural reception, with Europe providing a ‘safe exoticism’ for a Japanese spectatorship, (180) as well as audiences in other national contexts. Both Chua and van Staden situate transcultural flows of production and reception within wider continental and global contexts while other contributors provide more nationally-focused investigations of film and television genres.

For example, Valentina Vitali focuses on Ramsay brothers’ horror films in order to question what socio-cultural factors made these films possible in India in the 1980s. Vitali suggests that these films can be read as historical documents linked to the collapse of the Congress Party and the idea of a more secularised Indian society and the resultant resurgence of religious discourses. In the chapter ‘Everything Masala? Genres in Tamil Cinema’, Michael Christopher also takes a more nationally-focused approach, arguing that despite some aesthetic similarities with the cinemas of south India, Bollywood cinema made for Hindi-speaking audiences is not crucial to cinemas in southern Indian cinemas. (101) In these chapters a close analysis of Indian horror and martial arts genre conventions highlights both a collective national and political experience and regional disparities within India.

Despite the strengths of the textual and historical analysis throughout Genre in Asian Film and Television, particularly in the chapters by Vitali and Christopher, the overall study is perhaps too broad in its scope and vague in some of its aims and objectives. At times it is difficult to see how certain sections, such as those by Chua and van Staden, fit alongside more specific national cinema studies included in the text. Having said this, Chan, Karpovich and Zhang have compiled a collection of intriguing and at times original studies that not only provide new approaches to Asian media and the consumption of it, but also suggests ways in which national and genre cinemas can be reconsidered beyond the standard positioning of Asia vis-à-vis the West.