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Setsuko Hara vs. the Press: The Post-war Trolling of a Wartime Icon

In the past few decades, research on Japanese cinema’s most famous actress, Setsuko Hara (1920-2015), has tended to focus on her wartime and early work. Following her recent death, this focus makes a certain sense, as scholars, critics, and journalists commemorate her life by looking back on her youth, beauty, and peak popularity. In thinking about what I could contribute to the discussion at “Setsuko Hara@St Andrews” in January 2018 however, I was drawn towards Hara’s more difficult post-war years, when her star persona was re-fashioned from that of a pro-military collaborationist to a champion of the new social order espoused by the offices of the Supreme Commander of the Allies Powers, which supervised the occupation of Japan from 1945-1952. This moment in Hara’s career demonstrates the impact she had not only on Japanese cinema, but on Japanese everyday life.

Figure 1: Tsukamoto, Jirō. “Dare ka ichiban oshare ka?” Eiga Bunko vol. 2 (October 1947), 42.

The Occupation era, and more specifically the years 1945-1948, are in many ways the peak period of Hara’s unpopularity, driven as well as documented by the low-brow gossip press that scholars tend to avoid in favour of more academic titles like Kinema Junpō (The Movie Times) and Eiga Geijutsu (Film Art). Digging through the gossip press’ treatment of Hara, we can see the moment that certain journalists and audience demographics turned against her. I believe that this moment sheds lights on the posthumous focus on her very early work found in academic and critical media publications alike. Approaching Hara’s career and legacy through the lens of star studies, we can understand the Occupation period as an era in which critics and audiences registered a kind of backlash against Hara’s wartime star persona, and much of the commentary that followed as attempted rehabilitation.

As Richard Dyer argues, the star persona is constituted not only by the films in which a star appears (and which the audience supports by purchasing tickets), but also in extra-filmic discourse in various media (which audiences support by buying magazines or posters, and to which they contribute in the form of fan letters or opinion pieces).

The star phenomenon consists of everything that is publicly available about stars. A film star’s image is not just his or her films, but the promotion of those films and of the star through pin-ups, public appearances, studio handouts and so on, as well as interviews, biographies and coverage in the press of the star’s doings and ‘private’ life. Further, a star’s image is also what people say or write about him or her, as critics or commentators.[1]

The star persona is constructed not only by the particular roles a star performs, but also by critical and audience reception of these performances, and subsequent media discourse. Hideaki Fujiki’s description of the operations of star persona within the Japanese studio system tracks a similar trajectory, albeit with slightly different origins. In the early years of the Japanese star system, as actors began to supersede film narrators (benshi) as the focus of audience interest, a distinction emerged between American and Japanese stars, in that Japanese stars were initially not associated with their onscreen roles, whereas American stars were assumed to be similar in personality to the characters they played. By the 1920s, however, audiences began to conflate Japanese stars with film characters to the extent that stars began to explicitly distance themselves from their previous roles in popular press publications.[2] By the post-war era, the roles a star played had a formative influence on their persona and how audiences imagined their ‘real lives’ and the popular press had become central to the production and maintenance of star persona.

Hara’s first post-war role in Kurosawa Akira’s No Regrets for Our Youth (Waga seishun ni kui nashi, 1946) met with mixed critical and public reception. While critic Satō Tadao describes taking courage from the film’s “revelation” that some Japanese citizens had opposed the war,[3] many complained that Hara’s character Yukie was too eccentric and unrealistic. Kurosawa defended Hara’s performance, suggesting that one had to be eccentric to oppose the war in the face of totalitarianism.[4] However, Satō claims that early post-war women in Japan were not like Yukie, but were “traditional and gentle” and that the general view was that such violent female characterizations were not very “Japanese”.[5] Kurosawa reinforced many the widespread impression that Hara’s portrayal of Yukie was somewhat forced in an interview in the magazine Eiga Fan in which he claimed to have tutored her heavily in the role, and to have found her initially unsuited for it.[6]

Figure 2: Takada, Hideki. “Hara Setsuko san ni sasaguru koibun,” Eiga Fan 9, no. 10 (October 1949), 31

Hara’s spirited and independent early post-war characters, and by extension her star persona, were often accused of Westernisation, echoing the criticism leveled at Tanaka Kinuyo on her return from America in 1950.[7] The two stars were regularly mentioned in articles critiquing the presentation, particularly dress, of high-profile stars, for example, in Tsukamoto Jirō’s Eiga Bunko (Film Library) article of 1947 (figure 1). Here Tanaka is ridiculed for her “lack of style” in choosing Western clothing, while Hara is described as “a Western dress person”[8], aligning her public persona with Western fashions as well as behaviours. Such behaviours were not always well received. Tanaka and Hara were the targets of a critical article in Eiga Goraku (Film Entertainment) in April 1948, which argued that they had no iroke, or sex appeal.[9] Critic Matsubara Ichirō connects this to their wearing of Western dress, claiming that actresses who suit Japanese dress, such as Yamada Isuzu and Mito Mitsuko, have “masses of iroke”.[10] In such critiques of female stars’ physical appearance and presentation, we can see subtle criticisms of Occupation era American cultural hegemony presented as gossipy entertainment journalism.

In the early post-war era, the personae of stars such as Tanaka and Hara were engaged in a delicate negotiation between the respective images of an imagined Japan and an imagined West. While an Americanised or European-style persona could indicate a modern attitude, as in Tanaka’s “modern girl” (moga) persona of the 1930s, it could also suggest the attack on a perceived Japanese tradition that many interpreted in the Allied Occupation’s post-war social reforms. Many critics and gossip writers of the period call attention to “Western” aspects in Hara’s star persona, from her dress to her striking nose and the popular rumours that she had Dutch, American, or Russian ancestry.[11] At the same time, she was also celebrated as an example of traditional Japanese femininity as the nation’s “eternal virgin” (eien no shojo).[12] Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano has written of the post-war nostalgia surrounding the films of the Shōchiku Kamata studios as “evidence of a cultural politics of self-nativizing”,[13] and I believe we can see a similar affect in the nostalgia evoked by stars such as Hara for post-war critics and viewers. In the nostalgic appeal of the values symbolized by Hara’s star persona, anxieties about the loss of a unique Japanese cultural quality were allayed by the establishment of a link to the “longed for imagined community”[14] of traditional Japan in the coding of Hara’s postwar star persona as an imagistic link to the past. In this way Hara’s persona expanded to include both a celebration of imagined traditional Japanese morals, and sharp critique of their polar opposite – Westernisation.

Male and female viewers of the time seem to have responded somewhat divergently to Hara’s appearance, as an interview published in Eiga Fan (Film Fan) magazine in February 1949 shows. The two protagonists in this short conversation are simply titled “Woman” (onna) and “Man” (otoko). While the woman finds Hara a perfect example of natural female beauty, the man disagrees. The woman suggests he is finding fault with Hara in comparison to Western female stars, but the man cites Hara’s intellectual and distanced persona as the problem.

Woman: “But you’re thinking of women like Bette Davis and such, aren’t you?”

Man: “No, that’s not it. Hara Setsuko plays rich daughter roles, intellectual women roles; it’s hard to get any feeling from them.”[15]

In this analysis, Hara’s unpopularity stems from class bias which situates the warmer working class female characters of the shitamachi, or downtown, as more approachable and likeable than the elite young women and teachers played by Hara in the early post-war years.

Hara’s attitudes and appearance presented a stumbling block for many viewers who struggled to find her believable as a representative example of everyday Japanese womanhood. Many post-war era magazines, such as the June 1947 issue of Eiga Fan focused on her “exotic physical appearance”, describing her as an “incomplete beauty” (mikansei no bi), with a strong will and hysterical nature.[16] Her acting ability is recognized only grudgingly, in that she is accorded “all the makings of talent”.[17] However, her “aloof” (kokō) and “intellectual” persona appears to have made her particularly unpopular with certain viewers and critics who recorded their opinions in the gossip press.[18]

Hara’s perceived physical otherness or Westernness combined with this “aloof” attitude to great hostility from a number of male critics, who penned mocking critiques such as that published in Eiga Fan in October 1949 by Takada Hideki (figure 2). Takada’s article queries such aspects of Hara’s public persona as her lack of a marital partner, and is illustrated by caricatures of her famous scrunched-up smile.[19] A sketch of Hara bearing a cross refers to the self-sacrificing nature of her characters in Ozu Yasujirō’s work and to her perceived “Westernness” (figure 3).[20] Such material pokes fun at the righteous attitudes of Hara’s early post-war characters, combining their hauteur with Hara’s own sharp refusals to answer questions from the gossip press about her romantic life off-screen.

Hara’s star persona became something of a scapegoat for viewers critical of a number of social changes during the Allied, primarily American, Occupation. From the mass importing of Anglo-European and American fashions, languages, and behaviours, to SCAP’s insistence on the centrality of images of emancipated women in Japanese popular media, Hara symbolized all that was wrong in post-war Japan for many traditionalist viewers. While her star persona still carried the taint of her wartime collaboration, viewers on both the left and right of the political spectrum found her appearance, attitudes, and roles troubling.

Hara’s star persona just about weathered the transition from post-defeat to later post-war Japan, retiring to the home in Naruse Mikio’s housewife dramas of the 1950s, and OzuYaujirō’s family-focused works of the 1950s and early 1960s. Yet it is fitting that her retirement in 1963 was followed by the nation’s transition to a post-post-war state marked by the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and Japan’s subsequent accession to the OECD, occasioning a new understanding of what it meant to be Japanese, and a new awareness of Japan’s place in the world.[21] Forever marked by the historical events of her early career, Hara’s star persona now appears sunniest in those early years when she participated, perhaps in all innocence, wartime narratives depicting Japanese colonization as a great adventure with high ideals and moral foundations. In the aftermath of defeat and Occupation, Hara’s persona reminded many of that false hope, its loss, and the subsequent imposition of Anglo-European and American cultural and moral values on a poverty-stricken Japan. As the economy picked up and a newly futuristic Tokyo welcomed the 1964 Olympics, Hara’s star persona was consigned to the post-war past as the nation moved into a post-post-war future

 

Notes

[1] Dyer, Richard, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London; New York: Routledge, 2004), 2-3.

[2] Fujiki, Hideaki, Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press, 2013), 185.

[3] Satō, Tadao, “Nihonteki dentō to seiyōtekina mono,” in Kōza Nihon Eiga vol. 8, Nihon Eiga no Tenbō, ed. Imamura Shōhei et al., (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988), 24.

[4] Kurosawa, Akira, “Hara Setsuko no miryō,” Eiga Fan 6, no. 7 (December 1946): 4.

[5] Satō, “Nihonteki dentō to seiyōtekina mono,” 24.

[6] Kurosawa, “Hara Setsuko no miryō,” 4.

[7] Satō, Tadao, “Kiki to mosaku,” in Kōza Nihon Eiga vol. 6, Nihon Eiga no Mosaku, ed.

Imamura Shōhei et al., (Tokyo: Iwanami Shōten, 1987), 11.

[8] Tsukamoto, Jirō, “Dare ka ichiban oshare ka?” [Who is the Most Stylish?] Eiga Bunko 2 (October 1947): 44.

[9] Matsubara, Ichirō, “Iroke to joyū,” Eiga Goraku 2, no. 2 (April 1948): 13.

[10] Matsubara, “Iroke to joyū,” 13.

[11] Yomota, Inuhiko, Nihon joyū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000) 18.

[12] Yomota, Nihon joyū, 4.

[13] Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo, Nippon Modern: Japanese Film of the 1920s and ’30s, (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 129.

[14] Wada-Marciano, Nippon Modern, 129.

[15] Eiga Fan. “Shizen no utsukushisa: Hara Setsuko san” [Natural Beauty: Hara Setsuko], Eiga Fan 9, no. 2 (1949), 9.

[16] Kawahara, Michiko, “Hara Setsuko ron” [Discourse on Hara Setsuko], Eiga Fan 7, no. 6 (June 1947): 30.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Takada, Hideki, “Hara Setsuko san ni sasaguru koibun,” Eiga Fan 9, no. 10 (October 1949): 31–33.

[20] Takada, “Hara Setsuko san,” 32.

[21] Orr, James, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan, (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 138.

 

Notes on the Contributor

Jennifer Coates is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Arts, Culture, and Heritage at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, University of East Anglia. She is the author of Making Icons: Repetition and the Female Image in Japanese Cinema, 1945-1964 (Hong Kong University Press, 2016). Her current ethnographic research project focuses on early post-war film audiences in Japan. Jennifer has been a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. (2012), a Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian National University (2011), and a Hakubi researcher at Kyoto University (2014-2018).

 

Bibliography

Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London; New York: Routledge, 2004.

Eiga Fan. “Shizen no utsukushisa: Hara Setsuko san” [Natural Beauty: Hara Setsuko]. Eiga Fan 9, no. 2 (1949): 8–9.

Fujiki, Hideaki. Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; Harvard University Press, 2013.

Kawahara, Michiko. “Hara Setsuko ron” [Discourse on Hara Setsuko]. Eiga Fan 7, no. 6 (June 1947): 30-31.

Kurosawa, Akira. “Hara Setsuko no miryō” [The Appeal of Hara Setsuko] Eiga Fan 6, no. 7 (December 1946): 4–5.

Matsubara, Ichirō. “Iroke to joyū” [Sex appeal and actresses] Eiga Goraku 2, no. 2 (April 1948): 13.

Orr, James. The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001.

Satō, Tadao. “Nihonteki dentō to seiyōtekina mono” [Japanese tradition and Western style]. In Kōza Nihon Eiga vol. 8, Nihon Eiga no Tenbō, edited by Imamura Shōhei et al., 2–31. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988.

Satō, Tadao. “Kiki to mosaku” [Crisis, and groping for a solution]. In Kōza Nihon Eiga vol. 6, Nihon Eiga no Mosaku, edited by Imamura Shōhei et al., 2–75. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1987.

Tsukamoto, Jirō. “Dare ka ichiban oshare ka?” [Who is the Most Stylish?] Eiga Bunko 2 (October 1947): 42–44.

Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. Nippon Modern: Japanese Film of the 1920s and ’30s. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008.

Yomota, Inuhiko. Nihon joyū [Japanese Actresses]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2000.

 

List of Figures

Figure 1: Tsukamoto, Jirō. “Dare ka ichiban oshare ka?” Eiga Bunko vol. 2 (October 1947), 42.

Figure 2: Takada, Hideki. “Hara Setsuko san ni sasaguru koibun,” Eiga Fan 9, no. 10 (October 1949), 31.

 

 

 

Hara Double at the Brattle

Password: standrews

 

Notes on the contributor

Joel Neville Anderson is a PhD Candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where he holds the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship. His research is focused where consumer technologies of seeing and ecological crisis converge in the neoliberal era, working in experimental film and video, personal documentary, community media, environmental justice, film festival studies, and Japanese cinema and visual culture. Anderson’s writing has appeared in scholarly journals, anthologies, and magazines including Millennium Film Journal, Senses of Cinema, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Hyperallergic, Afterimage, Film on the Faultline, MUBI Notebook, and Screen Slate, and his creative productions have screened at such venues as Anthology Film Archives and Bronx Museum of the Arts. He has taught theory and history at the New School, SUNY Purchase College, and the University of Rochester, as well as production and media literacy workshops with the Museum of the Moving Image, Jacob Burns Film Center, and Downtown Community Television Center (DCTV). He curates JAPAN CUTS: Festival of New Japanese Film at Japan Society in New York since 2014, and Rochester’s avant-garde film series On Film since 2012. He serves as a producer of Aca-Media, the podcast from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and on the editorial board of InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, where he previously worked as Managing Editor. He is based in New York City.

Space and Transition in the Films of Setsuko Hara

The apex of Setsuko Hara’s stardom largely coincided with the reconstruction of the Japanese nation following its defeat after the end of the Second World War and the negotiation of a new interpretation of a nationally specific modernity. In numerous films for directors such as Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita, but especially in the key postwar titles she made with Yasujiro Ozu such as Banshun/Late Spring (1949), Bakushu/Early Summer (1951) Tokyo Monogatari/Tokyo Story (1953), Hara’s nuanced demonstration of feminine emotion articulated a specific sense of transition that had a bearing not just on female audiences’ feelings about themselves, but also on their broader subjective relationship to the nation as a whole. In this sense, they vividly enacted a particular contestation between tradition and progress in Japan’s immediate post-war social order at a time when the concept of a new formulation of nationhood was also, very importantly, intertwined with a concurrent and inevitable sense of loss due to change.

Hara’s star persona played a fundamental role in relaying questions of continuity, tradition, timelessness, memory and change from a strong female perspective. This was enacted in three ways. Firstly, this was partly down to a close fit with the generic patterns laid out by Shochiku studio, under the managing guidance of Shiro Kido, who had already achieved a reputation among a popular, especially female, audience for humanistic, everyday fictions that evoked a carefully constructed melange of social criticism, comedy and melodrama. Secondly, the themes of memory and tradition embodied by Hara’s female characters were given an extra dimension by being placed in a mode of representation which itself emphasised a sort of filmic heritage. Ozu and his regular team of fellow filmmakers that included the scriptwriter Kogo Noda, the set designer Tatsuo Hamada and the cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta used the flavour of the Shochiku genre and the repertoire of fellow Shochiku stars and character actors to produce a consistently recognisable product that had its own particular currency for the national audience. Then, thirdly, and very importantly, this currency then circulated in the film magazines and among the expectations of the filmgoer prior to and during the viewing of a new release.

Hara’s cycle of post-war dramas with Ozu coincided with Japan witnessing an extraordinary surge of industrialisation and productive capacity. This was accompanied by the drift of the populace to the major urban centres such as Osaka and Tokyo and an enhanced and much expanded material infrastructure. New patterns of consumption emerged during the 1950s. The upsurge in magazine publishing, the advent of television, the growth of rail and billboard advertising, all heralded an enhanced visual culture, which connected with the growth in disposable income and awareness of a new seikatsu (lifestyle or standard of living). Importantly, the pace of industrialisation was observed along with the development of commodification and the new consumer culture. Trains and stations were specifically incorporated into the narratives to suggest new kinds of movement and relationships between spaces and citizens. The conflict between the national tradition of the family unit and individual female desire became overtly played out in a prominently feminised cinematic space that recognized both the continuity of established gender patterns and evolving experiences of domestic frustration, containment and social exclusion. At the same time, new subjectivities posited by democracy were also given emphasis by the reluctance of the younger, especially female, generation to follow prescribed spatially related social norms.

The ways in which Setsuko Hara’s persona straddled these somewhat contradictory ideas may be explored by examining the specific issue of stardom, femininity and spatial representation. The role of Noriko in Ozu’s Late Spring, for example, gives particular prominence to feminine space in the home and with that several suggestive aspects of female friendship. Noriko’s significant confidante and ally, especially when it comes to discussing the inadequacies of men, is Aya (played with great comic vivacity and flippancy by Chikage Awajima). Like Noriko, Aya is represented as a modern and independent woman, aware of the societal pressures on women to conform eventually to the standard pattern of dutiful wedlock and maternity. In the film, the pair are literally separated from the mainstream by their taste for private, non-Japanese style living spaces above the conventional patriarchal space below. Setsuko Hara is associated with markers of Western modernity in other sequences. The freedom and spontaneity of a seaside bicycle ride is famously linked with the prominence of a Coca Cola sign and her character is also revealed in a conversation with the uncle to have had a bobbed haircut which would have placed her before the war as a stylish moga (modern girl). Both Aya and Noriko have working lives outside the home and are pictured with a certain amount of mobility on trains, in street scenes, and in coffee shops.

Setsuko Hara’s Noriko characters in all three features mentioned previously occupy more than one space in these films because of their narrative emphasis on transition and change. Her sensitivities to the continuities of the past, and especially her reconciliation with older forms of femininity, position Hara’s characters as pivotal, if ultimately consensual, figures in Ozu’s representations of the world of post-war Japan. Kathe Geist has developed the idea of Ozu’s extensive reliance on symbolic ‘allusions to passing time’[i], such as the preponderance of clocks, shots of smokestacks and steam and so on, by signalling the use of weddings and funerals. Given this context, the figure of Noriko takes on added significance in these dramas; through marriage in Late Spring and Early Summer and through the death of her mother-in-law in Tokyo Story, she is literally embodied as the important link between one generation and the other. In the funeral sequence in Tokyo Story, for instance, the figure of Setsuko Hara is positioned centre-frame. The sign that Noriko has bridged the past and the present is given by her father-in-law Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) passing on his dead wife Tomi’s watch. In an exquisitely moving sequence, Ozu links the continuity of female sympathy and the awareness of the passage of generations by soon afterwards showing Kyoko, the youngest daughter and newly placed friend of Noriko, looking out of her school classroom. She glances at her watch as she gazes onto the, as yet, unseen space. Ozu then cuts to a shot of Noriko aboard the Tokyo bound train and she looks down at the watch given to her by Shukichi. Here, the two women are specifically linked by their joint apprehension of the continuity of time.

Hara’s nuanced and fluid performances thus clearly remind us that ‘Japaneseness’ always remains a mobile concept that must be understood according to historically specific terms and gendered differentials. To caution against any notion of an embedded fixity to the concept of a ‘national culture’ means instead to be aware of how the concept has been appropriated and, in turn, reformulated according to shifting social circumstances. I have so far argued that the post-war period in Japan saw much rapid and ongoing change, and it is tempting to say that Ozu’s filmic representations suggested a clearly separable set of differences between the old and the new. But this was not always the case. Rather, I want to argue that Setsuko Hara’s performances often activated a negotiation between the past and the present so that a more appealing consensual version of continuity, a sense of the past within the present, was formulated for national audiences. This can also be seen in the way her films appropriated discourses of the past and national tradition in their representations of place and femininity that lay outside the immediate sphere of the home.

Most national narratives, since they are organised along the principle of linear progression, evoke the idea of a journey. The developmental journey from pre-modern society to the modern is always seen as unfinished, in that there is always more to be achieved in the name of progress. This is necessary so that the contemporary citizen is allowed a part in the organisation of the way the future is going to be. It can be argued that in order for this narrative, this biography of nationhood, to be made sense of, a parallel journey must be conceived of to take account of the past. In the face of the contradictions of Japan’s post-war modernity, which existed partly because of the unresolved definition of the legacy of the war, and partly because of Japan’s unfinished engagement with the West, Hara’s female centred dramas for Ozu specifically enacted this process of two-way looking. Part of the reason that Ozu has been celebrated as the standard bearer of Japaneseness is that he appears to have undertaken this process of remembering, recording and inscribing what it means to be a citizen of Japan. His films worked as a form of census in that over time they captured the full range and vitality of the ordinary female and male members of the national community. The variety of social types and the attention given to modes and norms of everydayness constituted a kind of record. His films can even be seen as social and visual maps in that they describe with infinite precision the contours and details of places which, once again, seem chosen for their typicality. This much may be glimpsed in his representations of domestic space, but it can also be argued that the same is true for his many other destinations. Thus, for example, the railway, that all pervasive element of Ozu’s cinema, can now be seen in its fullest context. The train not only visualised the mapping of the nation to the audience by literally picturing transition from one place to another, be it the journey Setsuko Hara makes from Onomichi to Tokyo in Tokyo Story or the one she makes from Kamakura to Tokyo in Late Spring, it also suggested the two-way nature of modernity through the duality of departure and arrival inherent in the nature of travel. To get to one place you have to leave something behind.

Many of Setsuko Hara’s commercially successful films of the postwar period were home dramas which certainly coincided with a prevailing discourse which positioned women as facilitators of what Lisa Skov and Brian Moeran have called ‘a transition from a patrilineal household system … to a woman-centred nuclear family in which … men’s dominance in the public sphere was neatly complemented by women’s power at home’.[ii] But this evidently this did not mean a wholescale regressive tendency. Through the careful articulation of performance and spatial organisation, Hara’s films also suggested a set of negotiated tensions about the places women can occupy in a nation in which the values of tradition and modernity were in flux. The values and conflicts of contemporary urban life in the post-war period were dramatised by suggesting a prevailing sense of typicality and ordinariness. It was particularly because of the sophisticated range of the Shochiku female stars such as Hara that prominence was so clearly given to the way this ordinary feminine space became the field where the contemporary and the traditional were fought over. Today, these films appear to be items of history—exquisitely composed images of a world already largely gone. But in their day, when cinema was still the way any nation saw moving images of itself, Hara’s films spoke suggestively to a largely female mass entertainment audience ready to see an important visualisation of the necessarily two-way perspective it had on its own relationship to the national past and present.

 

Notes

[i] Kathe Geist, ‘The Role of Marriage in the Films of Yasujiro Ozu’, East-West Film Journal Vol. 4, no. 1 (December 1989), p. 46.

[ii] Lisa Skov and Brian Moeran, ‘Introduction: Hiding in the light: from Oshin to Yoshimoto Banana’ in Skov and Moeran (eds.), Women, Media and Consumption in Japan (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1995), pp. 23-4.

 

Notes on the Contributor

Dr Alastair Phillips holds a BA in Film & Media Studies and Art History from the University of Stirling and an MA and PhD in Film Studies from the University of Warwick. He has worked for the British Film Institute and the Edinburgh International Film Festival and lived and worked in France, Japan and Australia. After teaching in the Department of Film, Theatre and Television at the University of Reading for several years, he returned to Warwick in 2007. Alastair is an editor of Screen and currently serves as the journal’s Reports and Debates editor. He also serves on the Editorial Boards of the BFI’s Film Classics series and the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.

Commercialisation as a Tool: The Commercial Transformation of the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

The Gay and Lesbian Films Season, now known as the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (HKLGFF), was founded in January 1989 by Edward Lam, a well-known Hong Kong film director and gay activist. It was the first time that Hong Kong held a LGBT-themed film event, and it was also the first time for such an event to take place in Asia. Before the new millennium, the Hong Kong Art Centre (HKAC)[1] organised the HKLGFF and Lam was the festival director who programmed the film festival. Lacking the experience of organising similar events, Lam made great efforts to adjust the programming style and enrich the forms of activities for the purpose of increasing the attendees as well as receiving the support from the local queer communities. The early HKLGFF has contributed to the prosperity of Hong Kong queer culture.[2] However, the failure of the box office impeded the development of the HKLGFF.[3] Due to the financial pressure and the disappointment from the Hong Kong queer communities, Lam decided to leave the HKLGFF in 1999.[4] Also, the HKAC suspended the festival in the same year. In 2000, Raymond Yeung, a film director, and Wouter Barendrecht, the founder of Fortissimo Films[5], brought the HKLGFF back to the public. Under the operation by Yeung and Barendrecht, and the HKLGFF gradually got rid of the previous style formed by the HKAC and Lam, and commenced the commercial transformation. Through the tough process for years, the HKLGFF has succeeded in transforming to the independent and commercial queer film festival recently.

Regarding the commercial transformation of the HKLGFF, Pang Ka Wai points out that the commercially transformed HKLGFF is male oriented, which means that the festival is operated based on the logic of the middle-class gay consumption, and argues that this commercially oriented logic weakens the political function of the HKLGFF.[6] The criticism of the HKLGFF will be analysed in detail. Nevertheless, the aim of this article is to critically rethink the commercialised phenomenon of queer film festivals and address the positive aspects that the commercialisation can lead to queer film festival by using the HKLGFF, particularly the period from 2000 till now as the example. I argue that the commercial transformation of the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival can be a tool for pursuing queer political goals and realising social value through increasing the visibility of both HKLGFF and the local queer communities as well as diversifying the audience in the long run. In order to review the commercial transformation of the HKLGFF, this article firstly explores why and how the HKLGFF has gone through the commercial transformation, and then it illustrates what significance of the commercial transformation is to the film festival.

Before expanding the research topic in depth, the term commercialisation, or commercial transformation, needs clarification here.  Rebecca Finkel proposes three aspects from which commercialisation acts on arts festivals,

“It is suggested that arts festivals are affected by commercialisation processes in three different key ways: (1) when they are organised principally for financial gain and when revenue generation becomes the principal aim, (2) when they are sponsored by a for-profit enterprise and (3) when they become vehicles for executing economic agendas.”[7]

Simply speaking, her claim demonstrates that funding of the commercialised arts festivals mainly involves box office and commercial sponsorships, and the festivals regard making profits as a significant agenda. Hence, combining the key words addressed by Finkel, in the context of queer film festivals, the commercialisation of queer film festivals means that the funding of the queer film festivals is primarily made up by the box office and/or the commercial sponsorships, while the festivals perform the commercial agenda as one of the priorities for the financial sustainability. While the commercial transformation of queer film festivals can be interpreted in two ways. One is the process of altering funding pattern to the commercialised one, and another one is that the festivals execute the self-adjustment from various aspects, including programming, events, screening venues, and promotion, in order to accommodate the commercialised funding. Specifically, this article will investigate the commercial transformation of the HKLGFF from three aspects, including programming, screening venues and funding pattern, while these three aspects are closely connected and interactive.

According to Skadi Loist, the majority of queer film festivals are registered as the non-profit organisations. Although “commercialisation of non-profits occurs when these organisations decide to produce goods and services with the explicit intent of making a profit”.[8] The commercialised process does not change the essence of the non-profit entity to the business company. Tuula Mittila defines the commercialisation of non-profit organisations as “a strategic process of developing an organisation’s mission into products and services, marketing and management of stakeholder relations and relationships, both internal and external.”[9] It means that commercialisation is a method that facilities organisations to accomplish the mission, the character of non-profit organisation remains the same. Hence, as long as profits are utilised to cover the routine operation expenditure and to invest on achieving social values as well, the commercialisation will not cause the alteration of being the non-profit entities in essence.

 

Before the Transformation: The HKLGFF in the HKAC Period

The analysis starts from exploring the background before the appearance of the HKLGFF, which builds up the whole picture for the analysis. The background information of establishing the HKLGFF reveals the situation of holding gay films screenings in the 1980s. Edward Lam himself had planned and organised different types of events related to lesbian and gay film screening before the establishment of the HKLGFF. In 1982, he founded Zuni Icosahedron, a Hong Kong-based international experimental theatre company adopting art and culture as a means of political intervention. From 1985 to 1987, Zuni Icosahedron constantly screened the queer films of Western directors, such as Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The audience of the gay films screenings were mainly local and foreign gay men who were interested in art and cultural events. Moreover, this type of audience also shares some characteristics of the main audience of the HKLGFF, which will be deeply analysed later in the third section of this article. All these gay cultural practices were the prelude of the HKLGFF. While, regarding the story of the HKLGFF’s establishment, during a trip to Britain in 1987, Edward Lam was inspired by the local queer culture, and felt that the LGBT community in Hong Kong had no similar means or space to express itself. Lam then came up with the idea and the project plan of establishing a local queer film festival, which he proposed to the Hong Kong Arts Centre (HKAC), which is a non-profit arts organization, which aims to promote contemporary performing arts, visual arts, film and video arts and provide arts education, the following year. Two members of the film department of the HKAC at that time, Ain-ling Wong and Yau Ching, who were hugely interested in gender and sexual minorities, supported Lam’s idea and decided to facilitate the holding of the HKLGFF.

As noted above, Hong Kong Art Centre took the responsibility of hosting the HKLGFF from 1989 to 2001 (a period I will refer to as the HKAC period). Although the HKAC claims itself as a non-government organisation, the HKAC has had an extremely close relationship with the Hong Kong government since the preparatory stage of HKAC. The Hong Kong government is one of the main sponsors of the HKAC; the government also appoints main governors of the HKAC and pays their salaries. The HKAC is a partially governmental organisation, as the Hong Kong government does not interfere with the actual operation of the HKAC. Therefore, the HKLGFF is a partially government-funded festival. The HKAC fully supported the festival through providing funding and event venues. Except for several special events, almost all the screenings events took place in HKAC venues, including Lim Por Yen Film Theatre (now known as Agnès b. Cinema), McAulay Studio and Shouson Theatre. In addition, the HKAC took charge of the publicity as well as the administration of HKLGFF. The HKAC utilised its own resources as well as the experience of organising similar events to promote the HKLGFF.

Both the HKAC and Edward Lam had rich experiences of organising themed film screening events. However, the actual operation of the HKLGFF during the HKAC period was not smooth. Here are the three characteristics. Firstly, the HKLGFF was not constantly and annually organised. Two years after the first HKLGFF, the festival began to be held annually, but there were also discontinuations in 1996 and 1999, and in 1997, the festival was held twice. Thus, the intermittent operation indicates the difficulty and disorder of the HKLGFF organisation at the time. Secondly, the scale of the HKLGFF varied in every year in terms of the length of festival and the number of films selected. The first HKLGFF stretched across three months, but the fifth HKLGFF in 1995 lasted for 18 days. In addition, the HKLGFF held in 1992 selected only 22 films; while, the fourth HKLGFF, held in 1994, screened more than 100 films. Thirdly, the name of the festival changed repeatedly during the Lam period. First, it was called The Gay and Lesbian Films Season, then became The Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1992, but changed to the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival the next year. It was renamed again in 1998 as the Hong Kong Queer Film/Video Festival. The name change reflected the identity politics of programming and the theme of that year. Generally speaking, the HKLGFF was in effect held as an individual new event each time in the HKAC period.

The funding of the HKLGFF was not abundant. Travis Kong points out the “tight funding constraint” cannot meet the requirement of bounteously organising the festival.[10] Hence, the HKLGFF started to seek commercial sponsorship in the mid-stage of the HKAC period (from 1995). The prominent Hong Kong gay disco Propaganda[11] started to support the HKLGFF from 1995, and its sponsorship lasted more than two decades, until Propaganda was closed in 2016. Furthermore, several commercialised companies began to support the HKLGFF since 1998. In particular, the fashion brand Agnès b. built a close relationship with the HKLGFF. As a result, the sponsorships of HKLGFF have changed from the LGBT-related non-profit organisations to the commercial companies of different types, which included non-LGBT commercial ones. increasing commercial sponsorship indicates that it was harder for the HKAC to provide sustained funding to the HKLGFF. Meanwhile, this also marked the prelude to the commercial transformation of HKLGFF.

As to the reason why HKLGFF had to change its operational mode, one of the prime reasons was that the HKAC found it hard to support the festival as before, as the HKAC was suffering from financial hardship. According to Fung ManYee, the economic crisis in 1997 seriously affected the source of finance, which almost reduced by half the rental income of the HKAC in the following three years.[12] The income mainly comes from the rental of office and venues, while the financial crisis caused a severe house price drop. In addition, Hong Kong residents had less income for discretionary spending on arts and cultural activities during the economic crisis. The ticket sales and the tuition fees were significant revenue sources of the HKAC as well. The HKAC thus had insufficient funding to organise large-scale activities; the HKAC itself had difficulty maintaining its own internal operations.

 

Two Main Stakeholders: Fortissimo Films and Ekdo Film Ltd.

In March 2000, Raymond Yeung and Wouter Barendrecht renewed the film festival and officially changed the name of the festival to the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival with the help of several Hong Kong filmmakers and film critics, such as Shu Kei. The HKAC did not entirely cut its relationship with the HKLGFF from the beginning of the transformation. It still hosted the festival in 2000 and then turned the relationship from one of fully hosting the HKLGFF to merely providing venues. In 2001, Wouter Barendrech and Raymond Yeung founded the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Society (HKLGFFS), a non-profit organisation that aims to promote equal opportunities and eliminate discrimination against sexual minority groups in Hong Kong through screening cinematic works and fostering a regular and stable audience base.[13] Since 2002, the HKLGFFS has been the official organiser of the HKLGFF. 2002 was the last year for HKAC to provide venues.

Since the break-up with the HKAC, the HKLGFF has relied on box office. With regard to state grants for film-related events in Hong Kong, the situation is tough, which means that the festivals in Hong Kong are hard to get the amount of public funding. The HKAC has not hosted or supported large-scale events such as film festivals since almost before the new millennium; neither is the Hong Kong government a significant financial source for local film festivals. Throughout the last decade, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC)[14] has not granted funds to large-scale events like film festivals[15], so the HKLGFF cannot rely on funding from the HKAC or the government. The HKLGFF has to become an independently run queer film festival. Nevertheless, the commercial transformation of the HKLGFF has progressed slowly, especially at the early stage of the transformation. According to Pang, the HKLGFF was struggling with a severe commercial failure at the early 2000s; Yeung and Barendrecht underwrote a large part of the operating costs.[16] Only the two directors or the HKLGFFS cannot sustain the HKLGFF, it is necessary to cooperate with other stakeholders.

With the assistance of Barendrecht, the Fortissimo became one of the official sponsors of the HKLGFF, and this thoroughly changed its mode of operation. With the help of Fortissimo, the HKLGFF was able to “obtain internationally renowned films”[17] and in addition, acquire certain films with no rental cost.[18] To be more specific, the HKLGFF has screened more Asian gay films since Fortissimo joined the festival, because Fortissimo focuses on the Asian Market and it creates connections between Asian films and worldwide audiences. The Fortissimo also contributed to the operation of the HKLGFF in other regards. For example, as Denise Tang states, Barendrecht’s own social network secured support from local businesses, especially to promote “festival parties at [the] gay bar Propaganda with little cost.”[19] The opening and closing parties were held in the Propaganda and the bar also sponsored the events by providing the venues and parts of the drinks. As Raghan Rhyne observes, “Barendrecht’s own commercial success translated into a solid foundation of private funding for [the] HKLGFF.”[20] However, the relationship between the HKLGFF and Fortissimo is far more complex. As already noted, Yeung and Barendrecht founded the HKLGFFS in 2001, but the operations of the HKLGFF strongly relied on Fortissimo Films during the transition period. According to Tang, “Not only does the festival [use] Fortissimo Films’ address as the festival address, the festival’s bank account is also managed by the company’s administrative staff.”[21] An important lesion we can learn from the process is the significance of certain stakeholders. In the stakeholder configuration, not all the stakeholders plan an equally important role. Some are more influential during certain historical junctures.

Faced with the situation of the HKAC fading out of the operation of the HKLGFF, one of the top priorities of the HKLGFF was to find suitable screening venues. Broadway Cinematheque, a local multi-screen specialty venue in Kowloon’s Yau Ma Tei district, came to the rescue. In addition, more and more cinemas, situated in high-end shopping malls, gradually became main screening venues. The high-end shopping malls in Hong Kong normally are the multi-functional commercial space that provides western luxury brands of clothing and cosmetics, cinemas and chain restaurants. In 2003, Palace IFC started to screen some of the festival films, and by 2004 it had become one of the main screening venues, showing almost the same number of festival films as Broadway Cinematheque. Likewise, AMC Festival Walk has supported the HKLGFF since 2005. Situated in a large, high-end shopping mall, AMC Festival Walk drew audiences quite similar to those of Palace IFC as well. In 2006 and 2007, the number of films shown in these three cinemas was almost equal. Moreover, the festival has added two more screening venues, Broadway The One (the brand-new upscale cinema in The One in Kowloon District) and AMC Pacific Place (one of Hong Kong’s leading stadium-seating cinema in Pacific Place in Hong Kong Island) since 2008. In fact, these five cinemas, Broadway Cinematheque, IFC Palace, AMC Festival Walk, AMC Palace, and Broadway The One, all belong to the same Hong Kong film company, Edko Films Ltd. Founded in 1950, Edko Films Ltd. is one of the main Hong Kong based? film companies, which dedicates itself to film production, film distribution and cinema running.

As commercial transformation and the actual operation cannot only rely on Fortissimo Films and Edko Films Ltd., there are various kinds of commercial sponsorships collaborating with the HKLGFF, including non-LGBT international commercial companies and LGBT media outlets. For one thing, the non-LGBT sponsorships are provided entirely by international companies. The types of the companies vary, from fashion brands to hotels and restaurants. Dim Sum, which is one of the most successful local gay lifestyle magazines in Hong Kong, and Fridae, which is the leading gay online media in Asia, collaborate with the festival as its online media platforms. Particularly, due to Joe Lam, who is the current Festival Director and also the founder of Dim Sum, Dim Sum has become the official media sponsor of the HKLGFF since early in the new millennium.

 

The Debate: Queer vs Commercialisation

Skadi Loist and Ger Zielinski address the grass-roots characteristics of early queer film festivals by pointing out that the activist media practice and social movements, particularly women’s and gay liberation movements, significantly contributed to the appearance of queer film festivals, and the festivals were usually funded by grassroots queer activists.[22] The relationship between queer film festivals and queer activism indicates that the priority of queer film festivals is to pursue the political agenda of gay rights and community empowerment. However, many queer film festivals also have commercial considerations: they select the films that can attract a larger audience, and with more commercial value. To be specific, queer film festivals prefer to screen romantic gay films played by handsome and fit white males, and as a result, lesbian and transgender representations are screened far less frequently. According to her research on the commodification of lesbians, Danae Clark points out that the marketing of lesbian images is less accepted by mainstream audiences when compared to gay images.[23] In fact, the practice of screening more gay films than other types of queer films exists in numerous queer film festivals all over the world. Rosemary Hennessey argues that ‘the increasing circulation of gay and lesbian images in consumer culture has the effect of consolidating an imaginary, class-specific gay subjectivity for both straight and gay audiences.’[24] The representation that focuses on middle-class gay men can only appeal to a part of the audience who are interested in a specific type of queer film. This also means that the festivals fail to attract other types of audience from the local queer communities.

Capital is the key factor of this issue, which limits the representations as well as the types of audience. Alan Sears addresses this:

In this context of commodification, a person becomes visible as ‘queer’ only through the deployment of particular market goods and services. Others are invisible, either because they are literally left outside the door (for example, because they cannot afford the cover charge) or because they cannot look ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ if they are old, fat, skinny, transgendered, racialised, stigmatised as disabled or ill or obviously poor.[25]

Through the logic of commercialisation, only certain queer communities can receive benefits, while the interests of others are more or less sacrificed. Members of the local queer communities can be visibly queer only when they can afford the tickets and attend queer film festivals. Simply, capital makes queer visible, meaning that the commercially orientated queer film festivals marginalise diverse types of local queer communities, as opposed to embracing them.

Due to the participation of Fortissimo Films, the HKLGFF programming has been transformed since 2000. Lam once stated that only naked masculine bodies can sell tickets,[26] whilst Renee Penney points out that romantic comedy is a ‘popular audience draw’ for queer film festivals.[27] Gary Mak, the festival co-organiser, claimed that Yeung and Barendrecht ‘tried to bring in more accessible work than Edward’s style’,[28] meaning that they preferred to select films with comparative commercial value, including romantic gay films, comedy, gay films with graphic sex, and films with big stars. Several Hong Kong film scholars have criticised the programming of the HKLGFF mainly from two aspects. Firstly, Day Wong criticises the HKLGFF for its western programming style, pointing out that HKLGFF has shown quite a number of western queer films without Chinese subtitles.[29] The target audience of the films without Chinese subtitles is therefore restricted to people who have some knowledge of English, or to the foreigners working and living in Hong Kong. She criticised HKLGFF for being too reliant on the western-queer culture, and for having ‘failed to capture the Chinese experience of same-sex desire and relationships.’[30] Furthermore, HKLGFF has also been criticised in terms of its gay-orientated programming. Pang notes that the number of lesbian films has always been much lower than gay films since 2000.[31] This, she concludes, has been the case especially since 2000, where the number of gay films selected has been several times that of lesbian films.[32] The western-orientated programming is closely related to gay-orientated programming, and through the interviews of several female festival directors of the HKLGFF, such as Denise Tang and Yau Ching, Pang admits that lesbian films fail to generate a similar amount in the box office as gay films do.[33] Likewise, Joe Lam also indicates, ‘…we try to program lesbian films. The market is so small though and there aren’t very many good lesbian films every year…of course the gay films are going to be [more] popular than lesbian films.’[34] Therefore, in order for the film festival to remain sustainable, the majority of the films selected by the HKLGFF possess commercial value, which means that the programming fails entirely to consider the interests of the queer communities in Hong Kong. The representations of lesbian and transgender individuals are neglected by the HKLGFF, and the topics and genres of the films chosen by the programming committee are relatively monotonous, as many of the HKLGFF programmes are lacking in experimental films or documentaries with serious topics, such as HIV-AIDS.

The western- and gay-orientated programming can shape and draw in a certain type of audience of the HKLGFF. According to Pang, local middle-class gay men who are around 30 and of white orientation are the targeted audience that the festival has sought since the commercial transformation.[35] Similarly, as Denise Tang highlights, the core identity of the HKLGFF ‘has often [been] perceived as a primarily upper middle-class gay male event.’[36] It is necessary to clarify what type of the main audience actually is, and especially the term ‘middle class’. According to Lui Tai Lok, a person who earns a salary from 20, 000 HK dollars to 50, 000 HK dollars (approximately £2,000 to £5,000) can be defined as the middle class, although only from the economic perspective.[37] Meanwhile, lifestyle and educational background are also significant.[38] More specifically, the main and targeted audience of the HKLGFF are 30-year-old, well-educated gay men who earn at least 20,000 HK dollars per month and who are familiar with western culture and lifestyle. I will elaborate further on two aspects of the festival and the targeted audience. Firstly, the screening venues indicate the main type of audience of the HKLGFF. Tang states that the cooperation of the commercial cinemas in the financial district of Hong Kong ‘symbolises corporate wealth and global consumerist ideologies’, and the screening venues have inevitably ‘predetermined the target audience’ for the HKLGFF.[39] As previously mentioned, the HKLGFF organises screenings in commercial cinemas in high-end shopping malls, and the ticket prices are around 100 to 150 HK dollars, which is double and sometimes even triple the price of the tickets in HKAC’s screening venues. The price is not relative for the working-class audience. Additionally, the publicity is intentionally aimed at the middle-class gay audience. Dim Sum was published monthly and available free of charge at most gay venues in the city; however, it moved from print to online in January 2016. Due to its business success and popularity among Hong Kong’s middle-class gay community, Dim Sum contributes greatly to the promotion of the HKLGFF. The cooperation with Dim Sum is a reflection of the fact that the target audience of the HKLGFF are middle-class gay people interested in art and culture. Additionally, they are the potential customers of commercial sponsorships, and the commercial operation is therefore likely to marginalise lesbian, transgender, non-middle-class audiences.

 

Increasing the Visibility and Diversifying the Audience

The screening venues of the HKAC were almost all in the Wan Chai area, a major hub of foreign cultural institutions in Hong Kong. Except for the HKAC, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre were also used for organising various kinds of art and cultural activities. Thus, in the HKAC period, the HKAC could be seen as a “closet”, which is a comparatively safe space for the HKLGFF. As the law decriminalising male homosexual conduct was passed in 1991, the queer communities in Hong Kong were still “in the closet” in the 1990s.[40] The main audience of the cinemas is intellectuals, which means that the audience is comparatively a minority group. The HKLGFF used the HKAC as a cover, which was branded as an art event, to offer the ambiguity to the queer communities, not definitely showing their intent as well as their sexual identity. This kind of public space also provides privacy to its audiences.

However, the commercial transformation has forced the HKLGFF to come out from the “closet” to go into the broader public space. Unlike the venues of the HKAC, both the Broadway Cinematheque and the commercial cinemas in the high-end shopping malls do not attract a specific kind of audience, instead, they reach wider audiences. Broadway Cinematheque is located in the Yau Ma Tei neighbourhood in Yau Tsim Mong district, with the consequent convenient transportation for audiences who live in Mong Kok, Tsim Sha Tsui, and Sham Shui Po. As Mak points out, that Broadway Cinematheque is “more for local”.[41] Also, due to the fact that rental prices in Yau Ma Tei are much lower than in the Central area, the ticket prices at Broadway Cinematheque are slightly cheaper than those of other mainstream cinemas. Other four cinemas, including IFC Palace, AMC Festival Walk, AMC Palace, and Broadway The One, are all situated in high-end shopping malls. Furthermore, most of those shopping malls are in the Central and Tsim Sha Tsui area, the commercial golden zone. It is symbolically significant when the HKLGFF came to the public. Joe Lam sees cooperating with a number of commercial mainstream cinemas as a gradual process of “coming out.”[42] In other words, the newfound cooperation with mainstream cinemas, especially those in high-end shopping malls, represents the fact that the HKLGFF has left the comfort zone created by the HKAC and entered the broad public, in that various kinds of audiences comes to mainstream cinemas, unlike the culture-and-art lovers of the HKLGFF at the HKAC period. However, the commercial cinemas can also limit some types of audience, in the other way. Indeed, the article should address the fact that the screenings of the HKLGFF in the high-end shopping malls can relatively restrict the audience who are non-urban and not affluent, which also means the people at the bottom of Hong Kong society. Nevertheless, following the logic of commercialisation, the festival should pay more attention to the audience (middle-class) who are possible to provide comparatively more commercial value for the festival, as they can afford both tickets and various kinds of commercial events (such as opening and closing parties) held by the festival.

The high exposure of the HKLGFF in commercial space is able to attract different types of audience, in other words, it provides the possibility to diversify audience.  Broadway Cinematheque is semi-art house commercial cinema; hence, it has already formed a batch of moviegoers who are easier to accept comparatively non-mainstream films. Joe Lam claims the HKLGFF can attract the “indie film lovers, [who] might be here to watch their favourite movie star.”[43] In addition, screening in high-end shopping malls can attract two types of audience. First, these locations attract a gay audience that is not a frequent movie-goer. For example, in terms of the audience of the Palace IFC, Mak states that “There is a gay crowd coming down from the gym to the cinema.”[44] He continues: they are “more affluent and more English speaking. They talk more about consumption, lifestyle, and parties, instead of sharing about the film.”[45] They are not regular festival-goers, but they have chosen to join the festival, when visiting queer film festival becomes a kind of trendy consumer lifestyle that reflects good cultural ‘tastes’ and middle class distinction. Second, the HKLGFF can also appeal to ordinary customers, as customer flow rate of malls is extremely high. Although the interests of the local queer communities cannot be comprehensively considered, the film festival, in fact, are diversifying the audience base. Moreover, Joe Lam states that queer films are no longer only for queer communities[46]. In other words, from the viewpoint of festival committee, the HKLGFF should no longer only serve the queer community.

The HKLGFF has started to enter into university campuses since 2015. Aiming at achieving the social values, the HKLGFF has organised a campus tour during the festival period. Cooperating with the Red Ribbon Centre and different student groups, the HKLGFF presents short films of diverse topics related to queer life and culture. As a free event to college students, this campus tour carries out the educational function without distinct commercial considerations, which is also the way how the HKLGFF actively gets touch with younger generation. Nevertheless, from the perspective of business, getting touch with college students is able to cultivate the festival audiences of the next generation, and to have good publicity for the festival in the campus as well.

On the one hand, from the commercial perspective, diversifying audience contributes to box office success. As Richard Ohmann argues, “markets are shaped, not discovered.”[47] These newly formed audience can also secure the attendance of the festival. On the other hand, from the aspect of social value, attracting these audience can shape the audience basis for efficiently realising queer political goals. No matter how each queer film festival claims its social responsibilities and the political goals, the aim of most queer film festivals is to increase positive and diversified queer representations to the broader public. actually, these political goals are more for the general public, not aiming to the queer communities. It is difficult for queer film festivals to convey the messages of eliminating discrimination as well as increasing social acceptance from the broader. In addition, according to Nanna Heidenriech, who was the curator for the Berlinale program Forum Expanded, “no festival passively responds to a pregiven audience;” instead, film festivals “shape audience.”[48] Although the engagement is not straightforwardly or efficiently effectual, queer film festivals can instil the idea of equal rights in the long run.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, after surviving a difficult period that lasted over a decade, the HKLGFF has become successful from the commercial standpoint in recent years. According to Gary Mak, “For the immediate figures, it is the box office [that counts]. So far, the festival has been doing well, especially in the last three to five years (interviewed by Stuart Richards in 2014), [when] we have been nearly sustainable just from the box office [takings] we earn.”[49] This claim shows the success of box office in the recent years, but also illustrates that the HKLGFF will maintain this type of operating model for the sustainability and the development of the festival. This article has highlighted the necessity of the commercialisation of small, local and independent queer film festivals, such as the HKLGFF. Nevertheless, both scholars and film festival curators have to think about the question of how this kind of queer film festivals can balance the commercial value and the social value with a limited budget.

The article has also illustrated that small local queer film festivals, such as the HKLGFF, are usually in cooperation with a few main stakeholders. The relationship between the festivals and the stakeholders is complex, while the impacts of the main stakeholders greatly influence the actual operation of the festivals. Furthermore, it is significant to consider the impacts of global networking of queer film festivals on the local queer film festivals when discussing the commercialised process and local specialities of the festivals.[50] This work open up the discussion of interpreting the commercialisation of local queer film festivals in the context of international and regional queer film festival circuit.

 

Notes

[1]          
A group of artists have come up with the idea of establishing a non-profit organisation to promote local art activity, and then wrote to the government to request a piece of land to build an art centre. Going through many hardships for years, with the help of Hong Kong Governor, HKAC was finally established with the new building in 1977.

[2]

Ta-wei Chi 紀大偉, “Fanyide Gongguan: Aizi, Tongzhi, Kuer,” 翻譯的公共: 愛滋, 同志, 酷兒 [Translation/Public: AIDS, ‘Tongzhi,’ and ‘Ku’er’] Bulletin of Taiwanese Literature臺灣文學學報 26 (2015): 91-92.

[3]

Xiaofei Zhen 甄晓菲, “Shishi Feifei Tongxinglian Yingzhan,” 是是非非同性恋影展 [Shishi Feifei: Queer Film Festival] 18 December 2007, Southern Weekly南方周末.

[4]

Ibid.

[5]

Funded in 1991 in Amsterdam, Fortissimo Films has been one of the world’s leading international film sales organisations, specialising in the production, presentation, promotion and distribution of award-winning and innovative feature films and documentaries by independent filmmakers from around the globe. For more information: http://www.fortissimofilms.com/about.

[6]

Pang Ka Wei 彭家維, ”Tamen de Gushi: Xianggang Tongzhiyingzhan Yanjiu”  她們的故事:香港同志迎戰研 究 [Herstories: The Research of Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival], (Master’s thesis, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009), 111

[7]

Rebecca Finkel, “Re-imaging arts festivals through a corporate lens: a case study of business sponsorship at the Henley Festival,” Managing Leisure 15, no. 4 (2010): 238.

[8]

Howard P. Tuckman, “Competition, commercialisation, and the evolution of non-profit organisational structures” in Weisbrod, Burton A., ed. To profit or not to profit: The commercial transformation of the nonprofit sector, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26.

[9]

Tuula Mittilä, “Commercialisation of Non-Profit Organisations,” Lugano: The 19th Annual IMP Conference, 2003, 5.

[10]

Travis SK Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities: memba, tongzhi and golden boy (London: Routledge, 2010), 70.

[11]

Propaganda (also known as PP) was the very first gay clubs in Hong Kong. Founded in 1991, PP was one of the most popular gay clubs, which was seen as part of Hong Kong queer culture. However, it was closed in February 2016. For more information: https://www.thestandnews.com/lgbtq/本地老牌 gay-bar 將結業-折 射 25 年來同志圈變化/.

[12]

Fung ManYee 馮敏兒, ”Art Centre 30th Anniversary,” AppleDaily HK, 28 February 2007, available online: http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/supplement/culture/art/20070228/6855023 (accessed 8 October 2017).

[13] 

From the official website, http://www.hklgff.hk/about-us (accessed 6 October 2017).

[14]

Established in 1995, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) is a statutory body set up by the Government to support the broad development of the arts in Hong Kong. Its major roles include grant allocation, policy and planning, advocacy, promotion and development, and programme planning.

[15]              For more information: http://www.hkadc.org.hk/?p=2242&lang=en.

[16]              Pang, “Herstories,” 54.

[17]

Denise Tse-Shang Tang, Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong lesbian desires and everyday life, (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 176.

[18]

Stuart James Richards, The Queer Film Festival, Popcorn and Politics: Popcorn and Politics, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 82.

[19]

Denise Tang, “Demand for Cultural Representation: Emerging Independent Film and Video on Lesbian Desires,” in Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures, Olivia Khoo and Sean Metzger (eds.) (Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2009), 176.

[20]

Raghan Rhyne, “Comrades and citizens: Gay and lesbian film festivals in China,” in Film festival yearbook 3, ed. Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung (St Andrews Film Studies: 2011), 116.

[21]              Tang, “Demand for Cultural Representation,” 187.

[22]

Skadi Loist and Ger Zielinski, “On the development of queer film festivals and their media activism,” in Film Festival Yearbook 4, ed. Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin (St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 49–50.

[23]

Danae Clark, “Commodity lesbianism,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove (London: Routledge, 1993), 192.

[24]

Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (London: Routledge, 2002), 112.

[25]

Alan Sears, “Queer anti-capitalism: What’s left of lesbian and gay liberation?” Science & Society 69, no. 1: Special issue (2005): 108.

[26]              Zhen, “Shishi Feifei”.

[27]

Renee Penney, “Desperately Seeking Redundancy: Queer Romantic Comedy and the Festival Audience,” (Master Thesis, The University of British Columbia, 2010), 30.

[28]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 82.

[29]

Day Wong, “Hybridization and the emergence of ‘gay’ identities in Hong Kong and in China,” Visual Anthropology 24, no. 1–2 (2010): 157.

[30]              Ibid.

[31]              Pang, “Herstories,” 99–101.

[32]              Ibid.

[33]              Pang, “Herstories,” 90.

[34]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 202.

[35]              Pang, “Herstories,” 122.

[36]              Tang, “Demand for Cultural Representation,” 175.

[37]

Siu Chuen Ou 區少銓, “zhongchande dingyi he lifestyle,” 中產的定義及lifestyle [The Definition of Middle Class and Lifestyle] latest updated, March 15, 2013, available online: http://www.liberalstudies.hk/blog/ls_blog.php?id=1415 (accessed 8 May, 2018).

[38]              Ibid.

[39]              Tang, “Demand for Cultural Representation,” 176.

[40]

Travis SK Kong, Sky HL Lou, and Eva CY Li, “The fourth wave? A critical reflection on the tongzhi movement in Hong Kong,” in A critical reflection on the tongzhi movement in Hong Kong, M. McLelland and V. Mackie (eds.) (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 192.

[41]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 232.

[42]

Chan Cow 陳奉京, “Jinjie Jujiao Kuaxingbie, Zongjian: Tongzhiyingpian Buzhigei Tongzhikan” 今屆聚焦跨 性別 總監:同志影片不止給同志看 [Focusing on Transgender, Festival Director: queer films are not only for Tongzhi], HK01. latest update, September 13, 2017, available online: https://www.hk01.com/藝文/117137/同志影展專訪上-今屆聚焦跨性別-總監-同志影片不止給同志看 (accessed 13 October, 2017).

[43]

Hsiu Wen Liu “Heart to heart: HK gay film festival seeks emotional appeal,” Asia Times, latest update, September 12, 2017, available online: http://www.atimes.com/article/heart-heart-hk-gay-film-festival-seeks-emotional-appeal/ (accessed 12 October, 2017).

[44]              Ibid.

[45]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 83.

[46]              Chan, “Jinjie Jujiao Kuaxingbie.”

[47]

Richard Malin Ohmann, Selling culture: Magazines, markets, and class at the turn of the century (London and New York: Verso Books, 1996), 91.

[48]

Michael Barrett, Charlie Boudreau, Suzy Capo, Stephen Gutwillig, Nanna Heidenreich, Liza Johnson, Giampaolo Marzi et al, “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One: Curators Speak Out,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11, no. 4 (2005): 591.

[49]              Richards, The Queer Film Festival, 133.

[50]

Julian Stringer, “Global Cities and International Film Festival Economy,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 141.

 

Notes on the Contributor

Heshen Xie is a PhD student of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham, currently doing a research on the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. His research attempts to explore the relationship between the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the global queer film festival circuit. Heshen completed the Master degree of Film Studies at King’s College London in 2016.

 

Bibliography

Barrett, Michael, Charlie Boudreau, Suzy Capo, Stephen Gutwillig, Nanna Heidenreich, Liza Johnson, Giampaolo Marzi et al. “Queer Film and Video Festival Forum, Take One: Curators Speak Out.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11, no. 4 (2005): 579-603.

 

Chan, Cow 陳奉京, “Jinjie Jujiao Kuaxingbie, Zongjian: Tongzhiyingpian Buzhigei Tongzhikan” 今屆聚焦跨 性別 總監:同志影片不止給同志看 [Focusing on Transgender, Festival Director: queer films are not only for Tongzhi], HK01. latest update, 13 September, 2017, https://www.hk01.com/藝文/117137/同志影展專訪上-今屆聚焦跨性別-總監-同志影片不止給同志看 (accessed 13 October, 2017).

 

Chi, Ta-wei, 紀大偉. “Fanyide Gongguan: Aizi, Tongzhi, Kuer.” 翻譯的公共: 愛滋, 同志, 酷兒 [Translation/Public: AIDS, ‘Tongzhi,’ and ‘Ku’er’] Bulletin of Taiwanese Literature臺灣文學學報 26 (2015): 75-112.

 

Clark, Danae. “Commodity lesbianism.” In The lesbian and gay studies reader. Edited by Henry Abelove, 186-201. London: Routledge, 1993.

 

Finkel, Rebecca. “Re-imaging arts festivals through a corporate lens: a case study of business sponsorship at the Henley Festival.” Managing Leisure 15, no. 4 (2010): 237-250.

 

Fung, ManYee 馮敏兒. “Art Centre 30th Anniversary.” AppleDaily HK, 28 February 2007. http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/supplement/culture/art/20070228/6855023 (accessed 8 October 2017).

 

Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. London: Routledge, 2002.

 

Kong, Travis SK. Chinese Male Homosexualities: memba, tongzhi and golden boy. London: Routledge, 2010.

 

Kong, Travis SK, Sky HL Lou, and Eva CY Li, “The fourth wave? A critical reflection on the tongzhi movement in Hong Kong.” In A critical reflection on the tongzhi movement in Hong Kong. Edited by M. McLelland and V. Mackie, 188-201. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

 

Liu, Hsiu Wen. “Heart to heart: HK gay film festival seeks emotional appeal.” Asia Times, latest update, 12 September, 2017. http://www.atimes.com/article/heart-heart-hk-gay-film-festival-seeks-emotional-appeal/ (accessed October 12, 2017).

 

Loist, Skadi, and Ger Zielinski. “On the development of queer film festivals and their media activism.” In Film festival yearbook 4. Edited by Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, 49-50. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012.

 

Mittilä, Tuula. “Commercialisation of Non-Profit Organisations.” Lugano: The 19th Annual IMP Conference, 2003.

 

Pang, Ka Wei. 彭家維. “Tamen de Gushi: Xianggang Tongzhiyingzhan Yanjiu.”  她們的故事:香港同志迎戰研究 [Herstories: The Research of Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival]. Master’s thesis, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009.

 

Penney, Renee. “Desperately Seeking Redundancy: Queer Romantic Comedy and the Festival Audience.” Master Thesis, The University of British Columbia, 2010.

 

Richards, Stuart James. The Queer Film Festival, Popcorn and Politics: Popcorn and Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

 

Rhyne, Raghan. “Comrades and citizens: Gay and lesbian film festivals in China.” In Film festival yearbook 3. Edited by Dina Iordanova and Ruby Cheung, 110-124. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2011.

 

Ohmann, Richard Malin. Selling culture: Magazines, markets, and class at the turn of the century. London and New York: Verso Books, 1996.

 

Ou, Siu Chuen. 區少銓. “zhongchande dingyi he lifestyle.” 中產的定義及lifestyle [The Definition of Middle Class and Lifestyle] latest updated, March 15, 2013. http://www.liberalstudies.hk/blog/ls_blog.php?id=1415 (accessed 8 May, 2018).

 

Sears, Alan. “Queer anti-capitalism: What’s left of lesbian and gay liberation?.” Science & Society 69, no. 1: Special issue (2005), 92-112

 

Stringer, Julian. “Global Cities and International Film Festival Economy.” In Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context. Edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 134–144. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

 

Tang, Denise Tse-Shang. Conditional Spaces: Hong Kong lesbian desires and everyday life. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011.

 

Tang, Denise. “Demand for Cultural Representation: Emerging Independent Film and Video on Lesbian Desires.” In Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures. Edited by Olivia Khoo and Sean Metzger, 169-190. Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2009.

 

Tuckman, Howard P. “Competition, commercialisation, and the evolution of non-profit organisational structures.” In To profit or not to profit: The commercial transformation of the nonprofit sector. Edited by Weisbrod, Burton A, 25-46. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

 

Wong, Day. “Hybridization and the emergence of ‘gay’ identities in Hong Kong and in China.” Visual Anthropology 24, no. 1-2 (2010): 152-170.

 

Zhen, Xiaofei. 甄晓菲, “Shishi Feifei Tongxinglian Yingzhan.” 是是非非同性恋影展 [Shishi Feifei: Queer Film Festival] 18 December 2007. Southern Weekly南方周末.

 

Introduction: Setsuko Hara at St Andrews, and now in Frames

The essays in this section, dedicated to Japan’s most admired and universally adored actress, Setsuko Hara (1920-2015) were first presented as part of the IGCCC workshop on 5 February 2018, dedicated to commemorating her amazing life and oeuvre. Her presence in the films of Yasujirō Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse and many others made Hara one of the most memorable faces in the history of cinema at large, even if she withdrew from acting in her early 40s and never appeared in film after 1962.
We screened one of Hara’s earliest films, the German-Japanese co-production THE NEW EARTH (a.k.a. The Daughter of the Samurai/Atarashiki Tsuchi/新しき土) 1937, directed by Arnold Frank and Mansaku Itami – in the version directed by Frank. Even though this was not her first role, Hara is only 17 years old when she appeared in the film, in a period that was marked by substantial propagandistic and political upheavals. In the presentations that followed, we heard from historian Konrad Lawson (St Andrews), who gave a fascinating contextualisation of the complex period in which Hara started her career. Other contributors included our colleague Philippa Lovatt (St Andrews), Bruce Chu (Communication University of China), and Alex Zahlten (Harvard University).

Frames is privileged to present three of the essays that were created specifically as part of Hara’s commemoration. Joel Neville Anderson’s (Rochester/Japan Cuts) video essay gives a deeply personal heartfelt overview of her presence in cinema. This is followed by Jennifer Coates (Kyoto U./University of East Anglia) illustrated essay on Hara’s image in gossip media and by Alastair Phillips’s (Warwick) finely crafted exploration of space and transition in Hara’s films.
This was IGCCC’s first workshop to celebrate the work of a female artist, part of our series of events that mark the oeuvre of cineastes that have passed away in recent years. Other such events were dedicated to Abbas Kiarostami, Andrzej Wajda, Om Puri, and Wu Tianming.

Dina Iordanova, Director of the Institute of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures

Framed Space and Framing Spaces: 61st BFI London Film Festival in Review

A film is being prepared. Red curtains drape in the cinema. Silence exudes through space. Meanwhile tourists stroll just a few feet away, through a quintessentially British lounge – perky, spacious, teeming cold-grays – of the Film Institute on the South Bank. A café flourishes with polemics among friends, the smell of grounded coffee filing the air, a modest attempt to induce the European into the wet sleepy London morning. At other times the café just stays empty. Perhaps it is not the film they came for. However, the films are the main event. Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames, charged with the director’s love for painting and photography, begins the proceedings in the main venue on the South Bank. Kiarostami is a name whose grip on Iranian cinema has long been felt: as some critics have pointed out, he is a bridge between the Iranian tradition that includes Dairush Mehrjui and Bahram Beyzai and the new (post-1990s) innovators, from the Makhmalbafs and Bahman Ghobadi to their contemporary heirs. His final film marks – historically – a quiet end to a fine oeuvre.

2017’s 61st edition of the BFI London Film Festival screened an immense amount of world cinema in a host of diverse venues, scattered across, more or less, central London. These venues comprised a mix of West End and non-West End theatres, pulpy retro salas and post-modern halls, and some – like the Hackney Picturehouse – that appear old-fashioned on the outside but newfangled on the inside. Most cinemas are within relative walking distance of each other, with the exceptions of those like the Hackney, and the aptly-named Rich Mix, an off-beat kaleidoscopic-patterned cinema stationed near the British Library. While the South Bank is one of the primary venues for new talents, other cinemas do their part in the line-up. The neon-lit Curzon Soho, as well as its more distanced Curzon Chelsea and Mayfair, screen a handful of important new European cinema. Besides smaller, specialized venues, there are the giants in town. The Empire Haymarket and Odeon Leicester Square monoliths together house well over 2000 seats in a space shaped gallantly by classicist atriums. Although typically reserved for blockbuster fare, this festival they were places for showing rarely-seen treasures of world cinema. The 4K restoration of avant-garde Japanese Funeral Parade of Roses, directed by Toshio Matsumoto, took on the Empire. It also screened rather expectedly, although appropriately, at the Grecian Institute of Contemporary Arts. Both venues are appropriate for seeing a film which retains a taste of grungy artistic modernism and self-aggrandizing scope. It is good to see a film that reached from formally breaking Nuberu bagu tradition in Japan to exerting influence on the other side of the globe, most considerably Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, back on the screen. The line-up of restorations continued with beautiful piece of British cinema The L-Shaped Room (Bryan Forbes, 1962) and stifling pieces of political cinema, including Mauritanian-French Soleil O (Med Hondo, 1967) and Cuban Lucia (Humberto Solás, 1968), screening in the South Bank. The restorations of diverse traditions meet their modern counterparts in venues that include: the Institute of Contemporary Arts, evocative of ancient tradition; the modern South Bank; and the giant Empire Haymarket.

The avant-garde is perhaps the most difficult of all types of film form to behold or interpret. The festival was not short on avant-garde, or films with pretense to that title, showcasing films that are in the very least experimental with form. Films like Elegy (Paul Bush, 2017), Olly Olly Oxen Free (Julia Dogra-Brazell, 2017), Films to Break Projectors (Ilobia, 2016), Meridian Plain (Laura Kraning, 2017) and Buried in Light (Gautam Valluri, 2016) all play with (meta) physicality of form, be it in: creating tension between light and darkness, electricity and cranking of machines, film reels, cuts and sparks; collapsing 35mm against 70mm and digital; or simply capturing empty palaces and dark tinted spaces of memory that invoke Robert Beavers. The meaning can often be hard to extract as most of the films rely on their sensory affect, which make some of them reach nearly all the way into one’s subconscious, while lacking some of the freshness of touch, formal virility and dry wit that constitute the best of avant-garde cinema. Nonetheless, the stylistic blend of venues, from the gray futurisms (South Bank) to the ultra-modern screens housed within Victorian edifices (Hackney Picturehouse) in which the experimentalists premiered provide the perfect ‘enclosure’ for their projects. The large block-letter sign outside the Hackney reading ‘CINEMA’ may as well belong to a Peter Greenaway film, the avant-garde selections premiering within representing a step closer to this self-conscious identification of film and exhibition practice.

Finally, after all the venues and films, one major thing in festival reviews is forgotten: the importance of animation. This festival showed many animations, including endearing pieces from the Netherlands, Spain and Canada. However, two cinematic new-comers prove most perceptive. First, Eva Cvijanović, director of Croatian-Canadian Hedgehog’s Home adapted a story of Yugoslav writer Branko Ćopić that attends to the quarrels of a hedgehog and a fox. Second, Dimitris Simou, director of the Greek-British Maybe It’s Me, uses pixilated animation to envision the fragmented nature of memory and time in constituting the soulful relation of a boy and his grandfather.

In the former, the wooly light-shimmering animation of Hedgehog’s Home, blended with morning-haze candlelight, details a hedgehog trying to preserve its small hut under threat from other animals, led by the fox in a Shakespearan linguistic to-and-fro. The film, however, most of all speaks to the integrity and peace of mind (precisely the Serbo-Croatian ‘um’) that one needs to guard carefully during times of peace and adversity alike. In other words, it is about ‘Imati unustrasnji stav’ (loosely translated as ‘having an inner stance’) which, once acquired, preserves you and those around you. The animation may too easily be compared with Wes Anderson; its semblance is far closer to the innovation, lightness-of-touch and existentiality of subject associated with the Zagreb School of Animation. It possesses a genuine filmmaking, bearing the flare of everyday life and breath of inspiration that needs to be all the more supported in today’s industrialization of film form. I look forward to a feature from Cvijanovic, and I hope others get to see this film, along with her equally great personal-documentary Baka Dana. In the latter case, the splintering pixilated animation of Maybe It’s Me brings to life the boy’s memories from first and third person perspectives: the small house, the fresh food awaiting the boy, the sitting on the beach – the pain of thistles and sea objects digging into his foot. Chiaroscuro lights the boy’s quests through the house of memory. A breakdown process occurs, as animation stops: a voiceover speaking of suffering is contrasted to a physical mouth being drawn, yet still unable to utter words. Pain is felt in the image. The boy has a final embrace with the grandfather whom he tries to retain in his memory, not to forget the inner importance of their relationship. The film represents a fine start in using fragmented animation to engage emotional turmoil. Using the virtues of animation more subtly to transform the end’s coldness into warmth, exterior emotional turmoil into inner spiritual warfare, may help the director to build on the human condition painting began with this work.

Overall, the BFI Film Festival of 2017 fused the past with the present: restorations of tradition with the newcomers yet to build tradition. It bore a mix of social realist film, documentary, avant-garde, experimental and animation cinema, all housed within easily accessible, vibrant venues that range from houses of ancient tradition to those with a vital sense of modernity.

Notes on Contributor

Mina Radovic is a Master of Arts Student of Film Studies and German Language, Literature and Linguistics at the University of St Andrews. He is a filmmaker and also writes regularly for international film and academic journals. Mina runs the Liberating Cinema Project, bringing newly-restored masterworks of world cinema to the UK. His research interests are in archiving and preservation, film history and historiography, Yugoslav cinema, world cinema and, in particular, the links between voyeurism and spectatorship in the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Uruguayan Cinema, 1960-2010. Text, Materiality, Archive

By Beatriz Tadeo Fuica
Tamesis, 2017
Reviewed by Isabel Seguí

Some books are more instrumental than others. Beatriz Tadeo Fuica’s recently published Uruguayan Cinema, 1960-2010. Text, Materiality, Archive is one of those volumes that comes to fill a long overdue gap in research. Moreover, the author does so in a monography that belongs to and acknowledges a new wave of local film scholarship conducted by her own generation of young Uruguayan film historians. The result is a comprehensive review of fifty years of cinema history in the South American country, taking into account not only the filmic texts (aesthetics and representation) but their physicality and the material course followed by these ‘bodies’ —towards preservation or vanishing— throughout different support media.

Tadeo’s book is the distilled result of her thorough doctoral dissertation conducted in an Anglo-Saxon university (St Andrews). The text was awarded the Publication Prize by the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland in 2014. In my view, the author’s approach and methodology benefit from a dual positionality, her origin as a Uruguayan national and the fact of having developed her writing in a British academic environment. Tadeo is an insider; she understands Uruguayan national history and politics in an all-encompassing way, and this translates to her interpretation of the films, which is nuanced, marked by a focus on complexity. Furthermore, there is a constant reminder on the part of the author of the tensions and negotiations present in each historical period and how they affect Uruguayan filmmaking in all its facets. In addition to being an insider, she has received a positive influence from the academic culture within which she raised her research. This can be noticed in the theoretical framework and the writing of the book, in particular, the precise communication of ideas. The author balances her two origins and influences in a way that guarantees the completeness of the result.

If the aim of the editors, and the author, was to situate the volume as a baseline for the under-researched field of Uruguayan cinema, the target has been achieved by its strong structure, strictly chronological order, and clear layout, which makes it easy to use as a reference book. After the introduction, there are four chapters. The first one is devoted to the cinema of the long 1960s. The second is focused on the cinema produced during the dictatorship (1973-1985). The third addresses the transition to democracy (1985-2000). And the last chapter analyses Uruguayan cinema during the first ten years of the 21st century. Every chapter is divided into the same sections: a historical contextualisation, a succinct account of the country’s tendencies in filmmaking during the period, and an in-depth analysis of three filmic texts and their materiality and current archival situation.

This last perspective, is probably, one of the main contributions of the book to the broader field of Latin American film studies. As the author notes in the conclusion: “the approach presented here, incorporating in the films’ analyses the experience of the archive and the condition of the copy used for research, could certainly be beneficial for the study of the cinema of several other nations, especially those which do not have an established film heritage and filmmaking tradition.”[1] This is an exciting methodological suggestion for those researching marginal cinematographies, and Tadeo’s book showcases how useful it is to track the copies that we hold, to understand the palimpsestic conformation of the filmic bodies on which the researchers are working.

Another significant contribution of the author is her interest in all types of formats and gauges. Tadeo advocates, programmatically, for a revision of the definition of cinema adapting it to the material context of production. In order to recover cinema history in countries without film industry, the researcher is forced to look beyond the production of feature films in 35mm. Consequently, it becomes an indispensable shift in the study of Latin American cinema in any national context to include small gauges and video as preeminent objects of research.

Following the last premise, the book takes twelve variegated film texts as case studies, and through them, the author transmits the fascinating sophistication behind every film process. For instance, the first movie analysed is the short documentary La ciudad en la playa (The City on the Beach; Ferruccio Musitelli with Sheila Henderson and Juan José Noli, 1961), funded by the National Office of Tourism to promote Uruguay as a vacation destination. This piece that started being promotional material has ended up being part of the canon of the Latin American experimental and avant-garde cinema. Or, the case of the documentary Carlos: Cine-retrato de un caminante en Montevideo (Carlos: Film-portrait of a Homeless Walker in Montevideo; Mario Handler, 1965) funded by an educational institution, the University Film Institute of Universidad de la República, with the intention of conducting a sociological research but which ended up being a piece of political denunciation due to the approach provided by its director. The film that closes the first chapter is Refusila (GEC, 1969) as a case study of the militant cinema developed in the country.

In the second chapter devoted to the cinema during the dictatorship, Tadeo shows how the inxiled artists managed to make subversive films using apparently innocent formats such as children’s animation in the case of El honguito feliz (The Happy Mushroom; CINECO, 1976). Or how the dictatorship collaborated with American educational film companies in the creation of docudramas such as Gurí (Eduardo Darino, 1978). Or the strategies used to interpret the events of the time critically —while avoiding censorship at the same time— using filmic reenactments of historical events, like in the case of the film Mataron a Venancio Flores (Venancio Flores was Killed; Juan Carlos Rodríguez Castro, 1982).

In chapter three are addressed the post-dictatorship moment and the transition to the video era. In that period, both state and television channels started supporting films such as El cordón de la vereda (The Kerb; Esteban Schroeder, 1987). Moreover, other commercial and political and technological complexities of Uruguayan cinema are addressed here, using the coproduction El dirigible (The Airship; Pablo Dotta, 1994) and the state-funded Una forma de bailar (A Way of Dancing; Álvaro Buela, 1997) as case studies.

The last chapter addresses 25 Watts (Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2001), a milestone of Uruguayan cinema at the beginning of the 21st century that marked the start of the producing company Control Z, which has built an international reputation. The second film analysed is Hit! Historia de las canciones que hicieron historia (Hit! History of Songs that Made History; Claudia Abend and Adriana Loeff, 2008), an indy documentary about the political use of popular music by the dictatorship. The last case study of the book is a fully digital production Reus (Pablo Fernández, Alejandro Pi and Eduardo Piñeiro, 2010). Here the author reflects on how the disappearance of film stock has allowed for a democratisation of the commercial access for marginal national cinematographies, such as the Uruguayan.

Through the pages of Uruguayan Cinema, 1960-2010. Text, Materiality, Archive, the reader navigates a universe of iconic institutions —such as SODRE (Official Service for Radio-television) or Cinemateca del Tercer Mundo (Third World Cinematheque)—, cinematic collectives —such as CINECO (Film Cooperative), GEC (Experimental Film Group), CEMA (Centre for Audiovisual Media), and individual filmmakers— although the emphasis is never auteurist. Tadeo has combed the institutional archives, has interviewed and accessed the personal files of a myriad of filmmakers and has established fruitful personal relationships with them that permeate the text of the book. Outstandingly, the author manages to keep accessible and clear the enormous amount of information behind this history of fifty years of Uruguayan cinema, without losing any rigour or simplifying excessively the portrait. Finally, in her conclusion, Tadeo invites other investigators to further the research conducted by her and her colleagues of GESTA (Group of Audiovisual Studies based at Universidad de la República), because Uruguay is undergoing momentous change not only regarding audiovisual studies but film heritage policies, funding bodies, film contests and alternative exhibition outlets. Tadeo’s book has arrived in the right moment to help to ground all this effervescence into a solid —although flexible and purposely unfinished— account of Uruguayan cinema.

 

Notes

[1] Beatriz Tadeo Fuica. Uruguayan Cinema. Text, Materiality, Archive. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2017: 149.

Silent Cinema: Before the Pictures Got Small

By Lawrence Napper
Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2017
Reviewed by Patrick Adamson

In terms of introductions to its subject, the opening quote of Lawrence Napper’s Silent Cinema: Before the Pictures Got Small does little to distinguish itself from its abundant popular and scholarly counterparts. Few lines on silent cinema are better known – or more oft-repeated, for that matter – than sad, overlooked former star Norma Desmond’s defiant reproach from Sunset Boulevard (1950): “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”

However, where in many cases it is presented as a bold but futile obituary for an era of motion picture production happily confined to the past, here it is repurposed not to reinforce but as a corrective for today’s dominant misunderstandings of silent film. It is by embracing the spirit of Desmond’s defiance and acknowledging that Billy Wilder’s aforementioned noir – alongside perhaps Singin’ in the Rain (1952) – remains the primary lens through which many non-specialists perceive of the silent era as a whole that Napper justifies this contribution to an arguably crowded field. The result is a wide-ranging and authoritative celebration of the vibrancy and enduring power of its subject: put simply, silent cinema doesn’t need dialogue; it is not “characterised by a lack”.

A brief text though this is, it nonetheless provides a compelling testament to the breadth and diversity of global cinema cultures in the medium’s first three decades. From its opening statement on, this book promises a new path to those approaching the period for the first time, one in which the familiar early landmarks of film history textbooks – Hollywood style, German expressionism, Soviet montage, British ineptitude – are relocated from their long established positions, now to be found as introductions of another sort: entry points to broader study of the popular cinemas of their respective nations.

Preceding these mini-studies is a comparatively short discussion of the diverse range of cinema-going experiences that emerged from the silent era, drawn here from a variety of sources and film cultures. Analyses of self-reflexive films, from Those Awful Hats (1909) to A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), establish that the movie theatre will not in this text be read simply as a site for exhibition: it is also a social space and a political arena, providing a captive audience for both the conventionally propagandist and the subversive.  Moreover, at this early stage and throughout the text, the transnational circulation of this nascent, but already glamorous and uniquely pervasive, mass medium emerges forcefully as a theme. As it is presented here, the motion picture as we know it does not take shape in isolation, as a scattering of movements detached from their conditions of production, but as the product of a complex, emergent global cinema culture – one to be pursued from the ostensibly “low” world of the nickelodeon to the intellectual coteries of London film societies.

The first of the text’s four main national overviews – entitled, “Beyond Expressionism” – begins with a quite orthodox examination of Robert Wiene’s expressionist global-hit The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). The film’s most unshakably influential reading is here afforded its due discussion – Siegfried Kracauer’s famous socio-political hypothesis that Caligari is a projection of war-torn Germany’s collective trauma. But the persistence of its core themes is not then pursued at length through films such as Der Golem (1920) and Nosferatu (1922), as might be expected.  Drawing upon a growing body of scholarship that problematizes the unqualified usage of such multivalent terms as expressionism, Napper instead encourages the silent film newcomer to consider how its aesthetic and industrial identifiers overlapped and hybridised across a far broader cross-section of the Weimar cinema corpus. To such ends, his subsequent examination of a young Ernst Lubitsch’s whimsical post-war comic grotesqueries – in particular, The Doll (1919) and The Oyster Princess (1919) – is cast as “a useful corrective” to the common reductionist paradigm whereby war-traumatised Germany is viewed solely through the unsettling, expressionistic prism of Wiene, Murnau, and their ilk. In these, he notes that in their “play, spectacle and pleasure”, one “searches in vain for the kinds of macabre themes” delineated above.

Eschewing the heavy focus on the innovative “art” film commonly found in introductions to German silent cinema allows Napper to evince a fuller sense of everyday movie-going experiences in a nation whose film output was born of extensive political, social, and economic upheaval. Similar can be said of his second major case study: the Soviet Union. It is popular Hollywood directors and stars – as opposed to the “revolutionary” Eisenstein, Dovzenkho, and Vertov – that are shown to have been the most consistent draws for audiences living under Bolshevik rule. Hollywood royalty Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’ promotional tour to Moscow in 1926 – along with the Sergey Komarov film it gave rise to, A Kiss from Mary Pickford (1927) – offers a suggestive testament to the transnational ubiquity of these American celebrities in the first decade post-WWI, while the author’s citation of intriguing forthcoming research into the adaptation of a recently rediscovered British production, Three Live Ghosts (1922), for Soviet audiences connects with current interest in the transnational reworking and repurposing of nationally-coded films, trends, and stars. Noteworthy also is a prefatory discussion of pre-revolutionary cinema, in which Yevgeni Bauer’s unique staging and complex use of depth engenders a revealing contrast with the language of contemporary American filmmaking.

Indeed, Hollywood looms large in many of the presented analyses. US cinema’s singular dominance both internationally and abroad, alongside its formal consistency and conventionality, sees it positioned throughout as the standard against which other styles are defined. Yet, the section dedicated to it focusses instead on American silent moviemaking by those at its margins, produced at best contiguously to its dominant practitioners: the works of women filmmakers, whose film-industrial influence in the entire course of the twentieth century arguably peaked in the 1910s; and immigrant narratives made in a studio system built, from its very founding, on the results of migration. When discussing the former, the respective practices of Alice Guy and Lois Weber supplement and nuance the usual predominance of the professed “father of film”, D.W. Griffith. From the latter, British-import Charlie Chaplin figures as the axiomatic star, incoming beneficiary of the new opportunities provided by the motion picture industry. Uniting these threads, the relatively democratic nature of stardom and its reflection of what was perceived to be a largely female viewership is then pursued through Clara Bow’s definitive flapper film, It (1927).

Britain is the final nation to come under scrutiny – a choice that the author acknowledges might surprise some readers. Dismissed in the most disparaging terms by nearly a century of critical tradition, this national cinema has been afforded a welcome reappraisal in the last two decades. Alongside close readings of Anthony Asquith’s sophisticated late silents, Shooting Stars (1928) and A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) – both of which have benefitted from major BFI restorations in the past decade – this final section seeks to reclaim some of this oft-dismissed national industry’s less revered productions. Sometimes accused of being sentimentally pastoral, if not reactionary in its realisation of British life, Hindle Wakes (1927) emerges favourably from such a revisiting. Comparison with the aforementioned It (1927) establishes this important work as a testament to the presence of a progressive social commentary in British silent cinema – one with which it has hitherto rarely been credited.

While Napper certainly departs from the canon in a major way, it is welcome that his analyses focus primarily on films which are currently available in quality home media editions – and, in many cases, only in quality editions, unlike some of the more familiar “classics” to which the uninitiated are often introduced in substandard form. Seeing the works of Weber, Lubitsch, and Asquith in editions prepared from 35mm materials which retain any original tinting and toning and are accompanied by suitable musical scores is the surest way to reinforce this text’s opening, and overarching, insistence: silent cinema is a form “complete in itself”. And therein lies perhaps the greatest value in Napper’s stance. A short introduction though this may be, in eschewing the common textbook structure of plotting a few disparate movements in film history, it manages to construct instead a nuanced and impressively cohesive picture of the diversity of silent cinemas and their cultures.

The Children’s Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative

By Noel Brown
Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2017
Reviewed by Peter Bosma, independent researcher

The experience of watching children’s films is an exciting but also mostly unclearly demarcated subset of contemporary visual culture. Analysing this segment of the film industry requires first formulating a clear definition of the corpus. In his opening chapter, Brown rightly argues that establishing a classification of children’s film is difficult. As a solution he distinguishes five contextual processes that establish a negotiated generic identity of children’s films:

  1. Marketing and distribution strategies (posters, billboards, trailers, release of multi-language dubbed versions)
  2. Merchandising (ancillary revenues outside the film market)
  3. Judgments of review boards (censorship and suitability ratings)
  4. Critical reception (newspapers, magazines, blogs, aggregated review websites)
  5. Exhibition strategies (film festivals, cinemas, television)

Within these boundaries, Brown chooses a rather broad scope. He bravely undertakes the attempt to cover the whole history of the production of children’s films in the whole world. His overview is partly a condensation of his earlier comprehensive publications about the Hollywood Family Film and the British Children’s Cinema.[1]  The only explicit restriction he mentions is to omit the discussion of teenage films. Also the subset of toddler films (for viewers of 3-6 years) is ignored. This is understandable, given the limited space of the publication, but the film supply for both age groups would deserve a separate inventory and evaluation.

Children’s film programming has a layered audience of children and their supporters (friends, siblings, parents, grandparents, cousins, teachers). The young members of this audience are all in full personal development, psychological and physical. Preferences, expectations and taste experiences alter rapidly when they grow up. For a film producer there is a choice: to cater for the largest possible audience of all ages, or to focus on a specific target group. Brown gives a historical sketch of the various options.

Chapter 2 covers the dual addressed Hollywood family film, dominated by the output of the Disney Studio. It is fascinating to see how the Disney Studio is able to maintain their huge market share world wide and international impact from their start in the thirties through several decades until now. Brown gives a neat explanation based on a selective number of references. This phenomenon would make a perfect question for an exam in film history, testing insight and knowledge. The answer key would contain five elements, situated in the Fifties: “the popularity of its live-action production wing; the release of its live-action spectacular 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954) which addressed an older adolescent-teenage audience; the creation of its own distribution arm; its pioneering partnership with television network ABC; the opening of theme park Disneyland” (p. 52).

Chapter 3 describes state supported European films produced with the aim of matching children’s experiences and their cultural identity.  He gives an insightful discussion of three case studies: The popular German film Emil und die Detektive (Gerard Lamprecht, 1931) with remakes in 1964 and 2001, the well-known French classic The Red Balloon (Albert Lamorisse, 1956) and the undervalued Indian film The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha (Satyajit Ray, 1969). In the same chapter the propaganda films in former Soviet Union and communist China are also discussed. They form a particular subset in this category, with an overdose of ideology conveyance and clear didactic intentions aimed at conformism to a regulative worldview.

The concluding chapter gives an overview of the contemporary state of things, dominated by co-productions of national cinemas with Hollywood. Examples include the Harry Potter series, the output of the British Aardman Studio, the Japanese Studio Ghibli and the influence of the French company Canal+ among others. Children’s films produced within the framework of a national cinema can struggle to be profitable in the home market and to be sold to film distributors and broadcast abroad. Happily enough, there are some exceptions in each country. Brown mentions among others the Danish film Rubber Tarzan (1981) and the Swedish film Kidz in Da Hood (2006). Further analysis of these good practices would help to stimulate and optimize the theatrical release of children’s films.

The overview provided by Brown is mostly clear, but sometimes confusing when he uses broad statements (“since the 1980’s”) in combination with very specific statistical data sometimes taken from different years and different periods wide apart. And there remain many white spots on his map (Dutch children’s films for instance). His overview is understandably dominated by a British perspective. Still, he gives the reader a thorough introduction into analysis of the specific conventions and meanings of children’s films in general. Brown formulates the essence of his argument as follows:

“Because of its didactic imperative, children’s cinema is also a profound expression of individual and collective identity – the codes, values, customs and norms that represent society’s claim to civilisation” (105).

We could start to investigate in more detail how this statement would apply to children’s films we care for. Brown ends with posing a still unanswered question:

“Who really watches children’s films, and what do people do with their experiences of them?” (105).

He presents this as an unanswerable question, but I would like to take it as a challenging invitation for further analysis.

 

Notes

[1] Noel Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter. London/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012; Noel Brown, British Children’s Cinema: From The Thief of Bagdad to Wallace and Gromit. London/New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016.

 

Notes on Contributor:

Peter Bosma (1960) studied Dutch Literature and Film Studies at the University of Utrecht. After his graduation in 1986, he coordinated the Open University Introduction Course to Film Studies. His fascination with film art led him to joining the rows of professionals of cinema exhibition as a co-film programmer of arthouse cinema LantarenVenster (Rotterdam), a position he held for twenty years. He focused on presenting film heritage, especially silent films. Eventually he returned to teaching film history, film analysis and cultural management. At the moment he is as freelance researcher eager to explore the field of film exhibition, the presentation of film heritage and its critical discourse. In 2015 his book Film Programming: Curating for Cinemas, Festivals, Archives was released by Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press. His most recent publication is the article ‘Some Considerations on the Diversity of Cinema Programs in the Digital Age: Notes and Topics for Discussion’, published at the website of European Digital Cinema Forum (http://www.edcf.net/articles.html).

Film Festivals and Anthropology

Edited by Aida Vallejo and María Paz Peirano
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017
Reviewed by Liz Czach, University of Alberta  

In the introduction to their volume Film Festivals and Anthropology editors Aida Vallejo and María Paz Peirano contend that the positive reception on the international film festival circuit of films from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), such as Sweetgrass (2009) and Leviathan (2012), points to the importance of film festivals as sites of negotiating what is, or is not, ethnographic film. “Within the anthropological context,” Vallejo and Peirano argue, “information tends to be prioritised over aesthetics or art.” They suggest that SEL filmmakers privilege aesthetics and thus have found a platform at film festivals screening documentary, experimental, or art cinema, whereas more traditional ethnographic films are shut out of these exhibition contexts. This reinvigorated debate regarding visual anthropology vis-à-vis film festivals is central to the book’s aim. “We argue,” they write, “that to understand past and recent changes within Visual Anthropology, it is necessary to study the festivals’ influence as both film showcases and social encounters.”

Vallejo and Peirano take a broad approach to the intersection of anthropology and film festivals not limiting their inquiry to ethnographic films screening at festivals but also consider how anthropological methodologies can be employed in the service of studying film festivals. With that in mind, the book is organized along two main lines of inquiry: ethnographic film festivals worldwide and ethnographies of film festivals. The book’s first section “Mapping Ethnographic Film Festivals” is subdivided into “Curating Anthropology” and “Case Studies.” In her introduction to this section, María Paz Peirano’s provides an overview of current as well as defunct ethnographic film festivals from the 1970s to the present and effectively establishes the network of ethnographic festivals worldwide, although her use of “peripheral film festivals” to describe those from non-Western festivals has the unfortunate effect of re-inscribing a margin/centre dichotomy that troubles much of film festival studies.

The book’s first section, “Curating Anthropology” opens with a reprint and expansion of Colette Piault’s pioneering 2007 essay on festivals, conferences, seminars, and networks in visual anthropology in Europe. This essay provides a template for the subsequent three chapters, with each expanding upon the dynamics of ethnographic film festivals in a number of regions in the world. Peirano looks into Latin American; Victoria Vasileva and Ekaterina Trushkina take on USSR and Post-Soviet Russian festivals; and Carlo A. Cubero covers the Baltics. These overviews are mostly descriptive and provide an informative snapshot of ethnographic film festival activity in these areas. The “Case Studies” of the next section proceed to a closer view of an individual festival including contributions on some of the longest running and most important ethnographic film festivals in the world. For example, the Festival dei Popoli in Italy and the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York City, get their due in essays by Vittorio Iervese and Neta Alexander respectively. By and large, these case studies take a historical approach discussing how the festivals were founded, ensuing debates about the nature of ethnographic film, as well as the sustainability of the festivals. In many cases, these histories are told through first person accounts from longtime festival organizers and contributors that provide some fascinating insights. For example, Jay Ruby, a key figure in visual anthropology for close to four decades, reflects on the years he ran Temple University’s Conferences on Visual Anthropology. Ruby, who has long advocated that ethnographic films must be made by filmmakers trained in anthropology, despondently resigns himself to the fact that this has not come to pass. More optimistically, Peter I. Crawford reflects on the films screened under the auspices of NAFA (The Nordic Anthropological Film Association), an association and event that continue to the present day. This mode of personal reflection is also engagingly employed in Nadine Wanono’s reminiscences on Jean Rouch’s contributions to ethnographic film events (beyond his well-known contributions to ethnographic filmmaking). Wanono, a former student of Rouch’s, paints a vividly engaging picture of Rouch and his festival Les Regards Comparés. First-person accounts also inform Paul Henley’s reflections on the Royal Anthropological Institute’s film festival; Eddy Appels discussion of the Dutch Beeld voor Beeld festival and Beate Engelbrecht’s analysis of The Göttingen International Ethnographic Film Festival.

The book’s final section on “Ethnographies of Film Festivals” is perhaps the most useful for scholars looking to employ anthropological research methods. As Vallejo and Peirano note, one of the foundational texts of film festival studies is anthropologist Daniel Dayan’s productive cross disciplinary essay, “Looking for Sundance.” Similarly, the four essays in this section offer some possible routes for how anthropological methodologies can inform film festival study. Given that most scholars attend film festivals as part of their research, the question of fieldwork and what role a scholar occupies as a participant are central. That is, are the existing models for doing anthropological fieldwork pertinent? Getting inside festivals and understanding their inner workings is one of the largest impediments to in-depth analysis of film festivals, thus Lesley-Ann Dickson and SED Mitchell’s essays about their work as insider/outsiders at the Glasgow Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, respectively, are particularly revealing about the possibilities and limitations of such approaches. Dickson, for example, was a doctoral researcher at the Glasgow Film Festival under a program that paired scholars with non-academic institutions. This official collaboration presented a challenge since “the work is expected to deliver two outcomes: ‘intellectual contribution’ to the academy and ‘operational usefulness’ to the industry affiliate.” Dickson’s solution was to adopt a reflexive multi-method approach shifting from audience outsider/insider to festival outsider/insider. SED Mitchell’s experience at the Toronto International Film Festival similarly shifted from audience observer to a “more participatory role as camera-operator for TIFF’s Midnight Madness blog videography.” Through this role, Mitchel gained better access to TIFF employees and was able to witness how the festival promoted organizational spokespersons as an information strategy for the festival.

Film Festivals and Anthropology’s dual focus on ethnographic film festivals, on the one hand, and anthropological approaches to festival study, on the other, results in a somewhat bifurcated volume. For scholars looking for productive ways to employ anthropological approaches to their research, the bulk of the volume on the range and history of ethnographic film festivals may hold limited appeal. It is also disquieting that these inquiries don’t more robustly interrogate the troubling legacy of ethnographic and anthropological film and non-western subjects. In her discussion of the Margaret Mead Film Festival, Neta Alexander points out that “in most cases the filmmakers are Westerners, while the subjects are non-Westerners” which “may serve to reinforce the dangerous assumption that ethnography can never escape its colonial roots…”. She argues, however, that the 2013 festival provided a “more complex and engaging future.” A little more unpacking of this “dangerous assumption” and how festivals are dealing with the colonial and racist legacy that informed ethnographic films could have strengthened this intriguing collection.