DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v22.i0.2978

Introduction

3.11, also known in Japan as “The Great East Japan Earthquake”, refers to the triple disaster that occurred in March 2011 mainly in Japan’s Tōhoku (northeastern) region: a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, a tsunami of 30 metres in height in some areas and a nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, leading to long-term contamination in several areas. The disaster led to significant policies affecting disaster-stricken territories, such as temporary relocation and scattering of communities and heavy reconstruction works. In this context, the notion of territory appears central to disaster management in its geological, political, cultural, and economic dimensions. [1] It is also a key notion for recontextualising artistic works such as films, especially when made in response to disasters. Considering Martin Lefebvre’s intuition that images can be looked at not only as landscapes or settings, but also as territories – that is, “a subjective and lived space”, “seen from the ‘inside’” and pervaded by issues of identity and belonging [2]– this paper argues that cinema can be an interesting medium to understand territorial issues, when produced collaboratively by relying on multiple subjectivities and visual experiences to look into territories from the inside. In line with this purpose, and to broaden the scale of the research, this work will address the entanglement between documentary film practices and collaborative practices known as “art projects”, known for their tendency to meddle with territories. Its case study, the documentary The Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Positions (Nijū no machi: kōtaichi no uta o amu, 2019, Japan, 79’) by Haruka Komori and Natsumi Seo, was shot in the coastal city of Rikuzentakata (Tōhoku) after the disaster and is centered around a “workshop” involving residents and non-residents. Post-3.11 films invite exploration of questions around cinema’s role in considering territorial issues and making the history of territories, which take on renewed significance after the devastation caused by a disaster.

Over the last fourteen years, many scholars have explored various aspects of post-3.11 cinema and arts. This paper aims to shed new light on long-term, late-blooming works, such as Komori and Seo’s film, that focus on the process of transmission rather than the actual passing down of stories of the stricken areas, representing a new stage in post-disaster artistic response. The paper also outlines Japanese independent cinema’s entanglement with art projects, a connection which has been understudied, although after 3.11 several signs converged in showing that cinema shared concerns with the expanding art project scene.

Conceptual framework

The term “territory” came to prominence in French geographical debates in the 1980s and has been an issue for scholars because of its polysemy. [3] Anglophone geographers long preferred notions such as “space, place, landscape, region, and scale” in their works on boundaries. [4] According to a recent work by French geographer Hervé Brédif, territory can be understood in four different ways: (1) a “domain/system for the deployment of a biophysical phenomenon”; (2) an “area of sovereignty and exercise of political authority”; (3) a “cultural matrix and place of identity construction”; or (4) a “constituent element or link in a globalized economic and financial system/network”. [5] His third definition draws from the work of Swiss geographer Claude Raffestin [6], who considers territory a “socially constructed space” [7] that equals “the ‘sum’ of the relations maintained by a subject [or a community] with their environment”. [8] This approach to territory implies that arts such as cinema, especially when exploring how humans relate to their environment, have the capacity to either observe or intervene in the making of territories.

The role of space or time in cinematic narratives is a regular and important topic in film theory. [9] Scholarship on cinema and territory has explored both filmic contexts – cinema’s relation to economic and political territories [10]– and texts – the “exploration, construction, or recreation of a territory” through cinematic aesthetics. [11] According to Morice et al, the “territory in cinema is a physical space but also an imaginary signifier, as recalled by Christian Metz [Imaginary Signifier, 1982 (1977)]”. It exists at the boundary of the “document” and the “fiction”. [12] Through its history, cinema has maintained a privileged relationship with urban territories and provided a space for reflection on what makes a city. [13] But it is not only about considering territorial issues through cinema, an art where image and sound are edited in ways that remind its audience of the very process of thinking; it is also about concretely intervening in the social construction of territories during the filming. In this last case, art projects offer an accurate example of how the ‘workshop’ apparatus becomes an opportunity to think about territorial issues.

Art projects (āto purojekuto) have been neglected by the fields of aesthetics and art history, except for a few works by Japanese scholars such as Kenji Kajiya and Sumiko Kumakura or French art historian Estelle Zhong Mengual on what she coined “art in common” (art en commun). According to Kajiya, though, the “art project”

has constituted a major category in Japan’s art world since the 1990s. The term chiefly denotes art exhibitions, but includes performances, workshops, and social practices that take place in buildings other than museums or in the open air in the city and countryside. It covers a wide range of operations from large-scale exhibitions organized by local governments to moderate-size projects organized by non-profit organizations to small-sized artist initiatives. [14]

Drawing on the avant-garde and outdoor exhibitions of the 1960s and the 1970s, the cultural development of rural territories and audiences’ waning interest in experimental art due to the growth of consumer culture, art projects were influenced by American public art (which arrived in Japan in the 1990s) and projects set in Japan by Belgian curator Jan Hoet. [15] The establishment of the Japan Council of the Arts (nihon geijutsu bunka shinkōkai) in the 1990s allowed artists involved in art projects to directly benefit from governmental grants and patronage [16], whereas the founding of semi-governmental organisations known as “Arts Councils” (āto kaunshiru) across various regions (including Tokyo) in the 2000s and the 2010s provided art projects with direct assistance and financial support. [17]

Like the British “art in common” studied by Estelle Zhong Mengual, which involves setting up a “participation device” that makes creation a “collective process” with a “dual artistic and political scope” [18], art projects are “community-aiming arts” [19] in the way they “empower[r], constitute[e], and activat[e] communities” [20] by transforming social contexts and overcoming preexisting social boundaries. [21] Art projects thus generate a transitory space and time where a territory’s very own human component, its communities, can step aside and think about its issues from outside, sometimes while mingling with individuals that are foreign to their territory, which is the very process of the film The Double Layered Town.

The Double Layered Town is the most awarded documentary film from the art unit formed by director Komori Haruka (1989–) and painter, writer, and workshop coordinator Seo Natsumi (1988–), receiving in 2021 the Special Mention at Sheffield DocFest and the Cultural Documentary Award of the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. In 2012, after the completion of their master’s degrees at the University of the Arts in Tokyo, Komori and Seo moved together to Rikuzentakata for volunteering work. The city was almost entirely destroyed by the tsunami, resulting in 1761 dead or missing people, 8035 damaged houses, and heavy reconstruction work – 124.6 hectares and 12.3 metres in height. [22] Komori and Seo were soon asked by locals to document their lives as mementos. [23] For approximately ten years, they used several media, including films, video installations (Komori), drawings, paintings, texts, and workshops (Seo) to address the issue of documenting tsunami-stricken areas. Several of these works were named the “Double Layered Town”, including a book and exhibitions made of poems and drawings that imagined Rikuzentakata in 2031. [24]

Through their activities in the city, and more recently in the Minamata disease-stricken area of the Aga River, the Noto Peninsula, the city of Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands, both artists demonstrate a strong interest in exploring people’s relation to the land and its history, especially considering the unavoidable occurrence of disasters in a world dominated by risk-inducing policies. Their works are the result of their listening to residents’ words (kotoba) and observation of landscapes (fūkei). [25] They pay attention to the material, small-scale changes of people’s everyday lives, in a gesture that relates to ecocritical art. [26] However, Komori and Seo’s originality among post-3.11 artists can be found in their exploration of the receiver’s position. The notion of “traveler” (tabibito) is key to their art – as will be discussed later – and helps them formulate the issue of inheritance in “transitional land[s]” – kōtaichi, a word used in The Double Layered Town’s Japanese subtitle: in their art, Komori and Seo address what should be remembered and passed on to future generations after a disaster that led to major territorial transformations. For Seo, indeed, inheritance is a means of subsistence, and stories contribute to it in the manner of seeds that travel and grow throughout several generations. [27] Here, film is being used as a way to connect individual stories to larger narratives in order to preserve territories’ identities in a self-reflexive manner that addresses the problem of reception and retransmission of a traumatic event that could seem to be beyond imagination.

3.11 and transmission

Undoubtedly, 3.11 engendered reconsideration of how to document and pass down the memory of stricken territories. As Gennifer Weisenfeld points out, “visual responses” to disasters and their “codifi[cation] into collective memory” inform how events are “narrat[ed]” and “remember[ed]” as history [28] – whether it is through the lens of “national trauma” or not. [29] Images contribute to the “memorialization culture” [30] that attempts to give a communicable shape to collected memories of the event for long-term transmission. As Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano has argued, the post-3.11 mediascape featured a large quantity of moving images taken and diffused by news media, artists, and citizens through “affordable, portable, personal digital media technologies”. [31] Images of the tsunami, the debris, the nuclear plant’s explosions, and residents’ distress were broadcast daily by television channels. Mass media contributed to the rhetoric of “‘ganbatte nippon’ (Hold on, Japan) and ‘kizuna’ (connections/linking)” by emphasising, in their reports, the importance of the mobilisation of non-victims, alongside victims, to overcome the situation. [32] Their political agenda implied partial commemoration and partial denial of disaster-related realities. [33]

Thus, post-3.11 cinema first encountered a desire to move beyond representations from mass media and explore the realities uncovered in doing so. Some of them failed to escape the appeal of visual pleasure in front of the disaster’s “sublime” landscapes [34] and the excitement of exploring dangerous foreign areas: they relied on “raw footage” of “dark tourism”. [35] Documentaries are indeed impacted by ethical debates: first, there is the issue of violating law by visiting forbidden areas, or disregarding residents’ sorrow [36], and ending up creating sensational artworks that may inhibit audiences’ capacities for ethical judgment and intervention. [37] Moreover, artists might be misjudged as re-using such realities for “personal gain”. [38]

This issue relates to questions surrounding the legitimacy of non-victims (hi-hisaisha) or people who were not directly impacted by the disaster (hitōjisha) to narrate the stories of victims (hisaisha) or those who were otherwise directly impacted by the disaster (tōjisha – a word from the legal field that became part of the common language after the Japanese Disability Rights Movements of the 1960s). [39] Post-3.11 Japanese mass media popularised the use of these dichotomies, suggesting that tōjisha’s experience remains inaccessible to hitōjisha and cannot be expressed by the latter. Thus, hitōjisha artists widely relied on the practices of kikikaki, writing after listening to the victims [40], and interviews. [41] The Double Layered Town addresses this responsibility of hitōjisha in this process of passing on the memory of a foreign territory.

Komori and Seo in the art project scene

Before analysing The Double Layered Town’s approach to territories and its relation to art project methods, it should be noted that Komori and Seo never use the term “art project” to name their activities. Indeed, their works are mostly exhibited in cinemas and art galleries rather than non-institutional public spaces, where art projects mostly take place. However, their art has been acknowledged by key figures of the art project scene, as will be explained below.

Komori and Seo’s initial project was to “travel throughout Japan to conduct field work and create spaces for creation [seisaku] and dialogue [taiwa]”. [42] Within this context, they moved to Sendai in 2015 and founded the collective of artists “NOOK” (pronounced ‘no-o-ku’), which has three types of activities: (1) planning events, exhibitions, screenings, and workshops; (2) documentation through surveys, images, videos, texts, drawings; (3) producing works that are consumable in the form of books, DVDs, films, web content, illustrations, and paintings. [43] Through NOOK, Komori and Seo manage projects that are anchored both in specific territories and in relation to broader networks. For example, their most recent project, “Karoku Recycle”, aims at recycling “documents of disasters” through arts to retrace their history. Documentation is made in “cooperation with the territories” (tochi to kyōdō) [44], and the project’s final goal is to create networks for territories and citizens to join forces when facing disasters. In that way, Komori and Seo’s activities share similarities with art project processes, especially since the art’s final product is not only the artwork but also its networks.

Besides, Komori and Seo took part in the “Art Support Tōhoku-Tōkyō” project (2011–2021) [45], which was conducted by Risei Satō, now Program Officer at the Arts Council Tōkyō, with the support of the Tōkyō Metropolitan Government, the Arts Council Tōkyō, and the Tōkyō Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture [46], to help communities rebuild themselves after 3.11 and to pass on their experiences to future generations. For this purpose, artists were offered consultations, benefited from already established networks, and could receive some financial support. This encounter with Risei Satō, a key figure in the art project scene, was long-lasting for Komori and Seo’s activities: he is now a consultant at NOOK, and Komori and Seo are taking part in his “Noto Records” project, which encourages artists to document the Noto Peninsula since the January 2024 earthquake and the September 2024 torrential rain disaster. Here, again, the project operates as a bridge between local communities and far away artists and audiences. [47]

Lastly, Komori and Seo have been contributing to workshops and online conferences about their ongoing projects for about three years at the Tokyo Art Research Lab (TARL). [48] For instance, they took part in the first edition of the seminar “Creating your own art project” (Jibun no āto purojekuto o tsukuru) in 2022 [49], together with director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi and art team “Mé”. The seminar’s purpose is to provide audiences with key information on how to launch their own art project – a “do-it-yourself” tone that echoes that of the Mediatheque of Sendai’s “Recorder 311” project of creating community archives of the disaster with the involvement of locals. [50]

As discussed, Komori and Seo are deeply engaged with art project networks, although they do not consider their works as such. In addition, The Double Layered Town is one of their films with the closest ties to the art project genre in its conception process.

The film’s structure

The Double Layered Town is based on footage of a workshop coordinated by Seo (mostly) and Komori in Rikuzentakata in 2018 for about two weeks. Its title refers to Rikuzentakata as a complex town made of two layers of space and time: the ground after the tsunami (past) and the ground after the elevation works (present) – a metaphor which promotes imagination. [51] Its Japanese subtitle “kōtaichi no uta o amu” implies the “weaving” of “song(s)” of a “land in transition”, suggesting that the film combines different stories about a changing territory as an act of memento – or a “modest heritage” (chiisana keishō), to follow the film’s website.

The film’s workshop brought together four apprentice actors: Haruka Koda, Leon Kō Yonekawa, Haruka Sakai, and Aoshi Miura, who are young hitōjisha chosen out of 50 applications. [52] They are referred to as “travelers” (tabibito) – their names only appear in the film’s credits – and had to perform three tasks:

• Readings of a fiction book by Seo about Rikuzentakata’s past and present residents in the year 2031. The book was first written in 2015 and later published as “The Two Layers Town: The Song of [this] Transitional Place” (Nijū no machi: kōtaichi no uta, Tōkyō, Shoshō Kankanbō, 2021). [53]
• “Field work” consists of exploring the city’s territory under reconstruction and talking with its residents.
• “Discussion/Feedback sessions” [54] to explain on camera how they welcomed and remembered residents’ testimonies, while relating to their own experience.

Like filmmakers such as Ryūsuke Hamaguchi in Happy Hour (Happī awā, Japan, 2015, 317’), Komori and Seo’s methods connect with those of the art projects in the way they rely on collaboration with non-professional actors – apprentices or residents – to build their narratives. The specialised vocabulary of art projects thus seems relevant to the analysis of the film. For the making of the Double Layered Town, Seo took on the role of what Claire Bishop calls a “collaborator and producer of situations” [55], and the workshop consisted of a “co-creation” soliciting participants’ creativity [56] around specific activities [57] devised by Seo and Komori.

Seo’s book is the central thread running through the workshop. She wrote it upon her own fieldwork in Rikuzentakata in an attempt to express the concerns held by the residents through several fictional characters, from children to the elderly. Each participant was assigned one chapter to read aloud in front of residents during their stay. To understand the characters’ feelings better and improve their reading, they walked through the city and met up with residents whose stories sometimes echoed those of the characters. Kōji Nakashima analyses the chapters as follows: [58]

1. “Spring 2031”, read by Koda (16 at the time of the filming), is told from the perspective of a young boy who lives in the upper town with his father. Prompted by his interrogations, his father takes him to the “lower town” through hidden stairs in the town’s memorial monument. Downstairs, there is only a field of flowers, but the father describes what used to be there before the tsunami. It is the world of the dead.
2. “Summer 2031”, read by Yonekawa (25 at the time), is told from the perspective of one of the dead who live in the lower town, during Tanabata (Star) Festival on 7 August. Its music and dance steps reach the dead’s ears in the lower town, adding to their imagined sense of how beautiful life in the upper town must be.
3. “Autumn 2031”, read by Sakai (25 at the time), is a conversation between an old couple and their grandchild in the upper town. While the couple share stories and songs in remembrance of the lower town, the grandchild realises their own responsibility in passing these on after their death.
4. “Winter 2031”, read by Miura (22 at the time), is told from the perspective of a father who is afraid that the passage of time will cause him to forget about his own deceased child. Unlike in the other chapters, he expresses concerns about the landscapes’ ugly distortion – due to the reconstruction – hindering recollection of the past. However, he realises that the new town will ultimately become the cherished hometown of new generations.

As the bonus features of the film’s DVD show, the book’s chapters were read aloud in their entirety by the participants on 14 September 2018 in Rikuzentakata’s kiosk in front of the “People of the Small Flower Garden of Rikuzentakata”. [59] This video record consists of full and medium still shots from different angles of readers facing the audience, low-angle close-ups of readers’ faces, and a few inserts of the surrounding landscapes (wide shots) or listeners’ faces and hands (close-ups). In the film, it was only used at the end of the first chapter (where the film’s title appears) and at the end of the last chapter (Figure 1), thus giving useful information to viewers about the circumstances of the readings that exceeds the frame of the film. To provide better sound quality for the readings, Komori and Seo appear to have re-recorded them in studio conditions to use as voice-overs for footage of the participants walking through the city, meeting residents, or volunteering. Part of the voice-overs also consists of “discussions” or “feedback” on their experience as listeners: fictional and non-fictional narratives thus merge in a confusing way [60], while words transform the audience’s comprehension of images and vice versa.

 

Filming the territorial landscape from a collective point of view

Landscapes play an important role in the film. As suggested by Lefebvre, paintings of landscapes earned significance during the 19^th century by “transforming purely vegetal and mineral nature into an image of human nature”. [61] Landscape is what is “perceived” by humans [62] – for geographers, it is thus something “symbolic” and “lived”. [63] In Rikuzentakata, past landscapes were places of memory for the residents, who are mourning their double loss following the tsunami and the reconstruction work. Their regeneration is an important component of the community’s revival, facilitating new places of gathering and commemoration. Komori and Seo’s visual approach to Rikuzentakata thus goes beyond the usual definition of the landscape: they care about residents’ sense of belonging to the territory when putting it into images. In The Double Layered Town, care was taken to ensure that the travelers did not remain external contemplators of the distorted territory. They were asked to walk through the city to learn what it looks like from within – through the residents’ perspectives and multiple temporalities conveyed by their testimonies, much like in Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life (1984 [1980]). Long shots depict landscapes inhabited by the travelers as they walk through the city; very few shots exclude the protagonists – unlike in other films by Komori, such as Listening to the Air (Sora ni kiku, Japan, 2017, 73’), where landscape shots without human silhouettes are regularly used as inserts. Drone shots are inserted right in the middle of The Double Layered Town (00:39:36): while they may express the travelers’ desire to grasp and convey a global image of Rikuzentakata, they reflect the opposite of what the travelers are actually doing, as the drone can only capture a superficial image of the territory – detached, external, and fixed in time.

In fact, in her previous films, Komori shot Rikuzentakata’s landscapes from places where residents themselves used to contemplate their territory [64], and these locations were likely used by the participants in The Double Layered Town – especially the elevated viewpoint, the cemetery, and popular roads. By doing so, Komori avoids two pitfalls: the production of an informational (cartographic) image of the evolution of the territory of Rikuzentakata, detached from any emotion; and the production of an aesthetic image given to the free expression of the emotions of viewers, without considering the emotions of the residents. If the image generated by a camera never equates to a human point of view, it can nevertheless serve as a medium to transcribe the idea of a collective point of view [65], shared by the residents, the film crew, and the travelers. This collaborative synthesis retraces the emotional history of the territory and allows the synchronisation of the sensitivities of the travelers with those of the tōjisha. It shows a desire to take care of the way hitōjisha look at foreign territories that bear the mark of an unshared trauma and restores their legitimacy to tell these places’ stories through space and time.

“Travelers” and words: a collective approach to “inheritance”

Aside from landscapes, in The Double Layered Town, Komori and Seo focus on words, and the figure of the “traveler” allows them to consider the roles of both tōjisha and hitōjisha in the memory of an evolving territory. The film’s framing suggests that the storyline is being told from the points of view of the four participants, through matching eyeline shot-reverse shots (especially around 00:09:50 when the participants are looking at the city from above), through over-the-shoulder shots with the participant’s shoulder in the foreground during conversations, placing the viewers in the participant’s position, and by following the participants from behind through wide still or travelling shots (Figures 2 and 3).

 

The film not only shows participants walking around the city or listening to tōjisha’s words during fieldwork: it primarily focuses on the “discussions” and “feedback” sessions, in which the participants repeatedly explain who they met, reformulate the stories they were told, interpret the tōjisha’s emotions, express how they felt about these interactions and question their own position as listeners and mediators of their words. These sessions occur on two different occasions. First, private interviews with each participant (Figure 4), filmed through mid-shots and medium close-ups from the front, and allowing camera gazes. The participant’s body is lit by studio lighting and stands out against the black background, allowing the viewers to focus on their voice and body expressions. The soundtrack from these interviews is either synchronised with its original image or used as voice-over on images of the “fieldwork”, alternating between different interviews. The second apparatus is that of group sessions with the four participants (Figure 5), in an empty room of a building (probably the new town hall), sitting directly on the floor. This apparatus appears only twice: at the beginning of the film (00:05:00), where Koda shares stories she heard, and at the end of the film (1:08:18) after a fade to black and just before the last sequence, which mirrors the first one by depicting the participants’ travel back home. Participants are invited to formulate any feedback they want to discuss with others and probably answer Seo’s questions, which were cut during editing. The film begins and ends with a high-angle shot of the four participants, who are later shot separately through eye-level full shots and close-ups. Here, again, the camera’s stillness and the editing’s slow pace allow the viewers to focus on the participants’ words and body expressions. This late sequence addresses methodological issues when rephrasing others’ stories: the problem of not remembering everything, of being subjective, and of not being able to access painful memories. Travelers appear as mediators – Seo herself designates them as baikai or representatives/people who express (hyōgensha) [66] – who, though being hitōjisha, navigated through tōjisha’s territory and acquired a better understanding of their condition and a consciousness of the issues surrounding the transmission of others’ memory and the history of foreign territories. The workshop thus makes it possible for hitōjisha to endorse the status of travelers and make their first attempts at passing on others’ stories.

Here, Komori and Seo use a collaborative method similar to the one used in their film Under the Wave, On the Ground (Nami no shita, tsuchi no ue, Japan, 2014, 68′), which displays different layers of storytelling throughout its three chapters. For this earlier film, Komori and Seo interviewed two residents of Rikuzentakata about the evolution of their lives after the disaster and during the reconstruction work. Then, Seo wrote a first-person narrative based on her recollection of these interviews and added a third piece, reflecting her own point of view. Later, they asked the original interviewees to read the texts aloud in front of a recorder, making corrections when necessary. These records were ultimately used as voice-overs for footage showing Komori and Seo with residents in locations related to the testimonies. This is what Nakashima called a “collaborative” (kyōdō) work. [67] According to Aoyama, by merging subjectivities into a common “I”, the film creates what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari called a “conceptual character” – one that is neither I nor You, but in between, and expresses something that exceeds both. [68]

In The Double Layered Town, it is not residents who reformulate a non-resident’s text about their stories, but rather travelers who engage in the process of reading Seo’s reality-based fiction book. Through this, they rephrase residents’ memories while also putting into words their own impressions. The film highlights a key mechanism of retransmission: the filtering of the residents’ and book protagonists’ sensibilities through those of the travelers, shaped by their own experiences and capacity for empathy. In this way, the film’s central experimental process consists in placing young hitōjisha from various regions in the role of “travelers” – a position well known to Komori and Seo themselves, as travelling artists. The film’s narrative thus emerges from the experiences of these apprentice travelers. Moreover, through Seo’s fiction book and the testimonies of both residents and travelers, the territories are explored through multiple temporalities. This approach frames the experiences of the four participants as part of a broader history of transmission, while also opening pathways for imagining the future.

To summarise the workshop’s process (Figure 6): travelers first lend an attentive ear to the residents’ words, aiming to better understand the emotions of the protagonists in Seo’s book’s and to gain residents’ trust – a necessary step for them to share their own stories. In doing so, travelers confront their imagination with reality, allowing for “affective resonances” to emerge between themselves and the residents. [69] They also lend an attentive eye to the city’s landscapes by exploring the territory and visiting locations frequented by the residents, with the drone shot being the only exception. The Double Layered Town workshop’s individual and group feedback sessions serve a dual purpose: they allow participants to rehearse the act of reformulating others’ words and explaining contextual details, testing the limits of their own memory and interpretation; and they encourage a form of self-reflexivity, prompting participants to question the very process and history of how territorial memory is transmitted across space and time. While watching the film, viewers are invited to share in these reflections.

 

Conclusion

As Irena Latek et al point out, the appeal of cinema in the representation of territory lies in its capacity to “short-circuit heterogeneous data to represent life”, thanks to what architect Rem Koolhaas has described as a “system of systematic and intelligent ruptures”. In this sense, cinema uses imagination to open up reality by offering new perspectives – distinct from those allowed by “non-artistic tools of conception and representation”. [70]

In the case of The Double Layered Town, art becomes a means of challenging the viewer’s imagination and opening it to unfamiliar realities through the participants’ physical and emotional exploration of a foreign territory during the workshop. By looking at a territory’s landscape from the viewpoints used by the local community, and by listening to and reformulating intertemporal stories shared by residents, participants are offered long-term tools for acquiring a deep, multidimensional knowledge – intellectual, emotional, and sensory – of a transforming and unfamiliar territory. Such understanding supports not only personal reflection, but also the remembrance and transmission of that territory’s evolving identity.

This process requires the collaboration of both residents and non-residents, as the collective memory of territories can only be sustained through the sharing of multiple subjectivities. As Robert Putnam, following sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, notes, the success of such transmission depends on fostering both “bonding social capital” (intra-communal ties) and “bridging social capital” (extra-communal connections), which is one of the art projects’ aims [71] and which is achieved in The Double Layered Town by encouraging encounters between travelers and residents. Through this process, the film addresses the inheritance of testimonies left by Rikuzentakata’s residents regarding the transformation of their territory after the disaster. It also raises the question of how such memories can be transmitted to other communities and future generations, contributing to the recollection of lost territories and prompting reflection on territorial issues in relation to their historical context.

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Notes

[1] Four dimensions discussed in Hervé Brédif, Réaliser la terre: prise en charge du vivant et contrat territorial [Embracing the Earth: Managing the Living and Territorial Pact] (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021).

[2] Martin Lefebvre, ‘Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema’, in Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre, AFI Film Readers (Routledge, 2006), 53.

[3]Brédif, Réaliser la terre, 141.

[4] Joe Painter, ‘Rethinking Territory’, Antipode 42, no. 5 (2010): 1091–93.

[5] Brédif, Réaliser la terre, 143–53.

[6] Claude Raffestin, Pour une géographie du pouvoir [For a Geography of Power], (Librairie technique, 1980).

[7] Brédif, Réaliser la terre, 149.

[8] Martin Lefebvre, ‘Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema’, in Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre, AFI Film Readers (New York: Routledge, 2006), 53, quoting Raffestin (1980, 145).

[9] For instance, David Bordwell et al., Film Art: An Introduction (McGraw-Hill Education, 2019); Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows (University of California Press, 1990); Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’image-temps [Cinema 2: Time-image] (Minuit, 1985).

[10] See, for instance, Agustín Gámir Orueta and Carlos Manuel Valdés, ‘Cinema and Geography: Geographic Space, Landscape and Territory in the Film Industry’, Boletín de La Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles, no. 45 (2007): 157–90; K. A. Borisovskaya and S. A. Risinson, ‘Cinema as a Modern Trend of the Territory Branding Development’, Kubik, 2019, 17–19; Delphine Le Nozach, ‘The “placement” of territory in films. Statuses, modalities, and ways of presenting territories in films, Communication & langages 202, no. 4 (2019): 25–38; Amanda Rueda, ‘Festival de cinéma : Médiations et construction de Territoires imaginaires [Film Festival: Mediations and Construction of Imaginary Territories]’, Culture & Musées 14, no. 1 (2009): 149–71, https://doi.org/10.3406/pumus.2009.1512.

[11] Jean-René Morice et al., eds., Territoires Du Cinéma [Territories of Cinema] (L’Harmattan, 2017), 13–14. Also see Stephen Groening, Cinema Beyond Territory (British Film Institute, 2014), https://www.torrossa.com/en/resources/an/5203219.

[12] Morice et al., Territoires Du Cinéma, 12. They rely on Jacques Rancière’s Film Fables (2016 [2001]).

[13] Nicolas Droin and Mélanie Forret, eds., Écrire la ville au cinéma: traces, mouvements, imbrications [Writing the City in Cinema: Traces, Movements, Interconnections] (Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2022), 6.

[14] Kenji Kajiya, ‘Japanese Art Projects in History’, Field 7 (Spring 2017): para. 1.

[15] Kajiya, ‘Japanese Art Projects in History’; Sumiko Kumakura and Yuichiro Nagatsu, An Overview of Art Projects in Japan: A Society That Co-Creates with Art (Tokyo Art Research Lab (Tokyo University of the Arts), 2015), 4–5.

[16] Kumakura and Nagatsu, An Overview of Art Projects in Japan, 6.

[17] Yayoi Yoshizawa, ‘Heisei 27 Nendo Sōgō Bunka Kenkyūjo Kenkyūjosei “Āatsu Kaunshiru to Bunka Seisaku” Ni Kansuru Hōkoku [2015 Report on “The Cultural Policy of the Arts Council” with Research Support from the Arts and Sciences Laboratory]’, Bulletin of Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Science and Culture Kyoritsu Women’s University & Junior College, no. 23 (February 2017): 219.

[18] Estelle Zhong Mengual, L’art en commun: réinventer les formes du collectif en contexte démocratique [Art in Common: Reinventing Forms of the Collective in a Democratic Context] (Presses du réel, 2018), 12–13.

[19] Kumakura and Nagatsu, An Overview of Art Projects in Japan, 11.

[20] Zhong Mengual, L’art en commun, 147–48.

[21] Kumakura and Nagatsu, An Overview of Art Projects in Japan, 31–32.

[22] Kōji Nakashima, ‘Hisaichi No Fukkō o Meguru Basho No Sōshitsu to Saikōchiku: Seo Natsumi “nijū No Machi” o Yomu [Loss and Reconstruction of Places in Rikuzentakata: Reading Natsumi Seo’s “Nijyuu No Machi”]’, Space, Society and Geographical Thought, no. 25 (2022): 3.

[23] Yū Takehisa, ‘After the Exhibition Artists and the Disaster: Documentation in Progress’, trans. Justin Jesty, FIELD Issue 7 ‘Japan’s Social Turn Vol. 1’ (2017).

[24] Ryan Holmberg, ‘Overview: In The Aftermath’, ARTnews.Com, 21 April 2016, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/overview-in-the-aftermath-62150/.

[25] Haruka Komori and Natsumi Seo, ‘File 11. Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi: tabibito toshite kairo o tsukuru [File 11. Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi: Opening New Routes as Travelers]’, YouTube – Tokyo Art Research Lab Channel, 11 August 2023, https://youtu.be/M6kiOigzUpA.

[26] This is particularly relevant in Seo’s “New Habitations” project (sumu no fūkei, lit. “the landscape of inhabiting”): https://newhabitations.com/about/ (last consultation on 15 May 2025).

[27] Natsumi Seo, Awai yuku koro : Rikuzentakata shinsaigo wo ikiru [In-between times: living in Rikuzentakata after the disaster] (Shōbunsha, 2019), 19-21 ; 341–42.

[28] Gennifer Weisenfeld, ‘Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923’, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 13, no. 4 (2015): 1–13.

[29] Rachel DiNitto, ‘Narrating the Cultural Trauma of 3/11: The Debris of Post-Fukushima Literature and Film’, Japan Forum 26, no. 3 (2014): 340–41.

[30] Julia Gerster, ‘Beneath the Invisible Cloud. Kamishibai After 11 March: Between Disaster Risk Education and Memorialisation’, Amfiteater (Ljubljana) 7, no. 1 (2019): 65. Also see: Yūsuke Matsuura, ‘Kioku media toshite no saigai ikō: 3.11 no kiokujutsu [Memory Media as vestiges of disasters: Memorial Techniques of 3.11]’, in Posuto san ten ichi ichi media gensetsu saikō [Reflexions on post-3.11 Mediatic Discourses], ed. Marciano Wada-Mitsuyo (Presses de l’Université de Hōsei, 2019), 3–4.

[31]  Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, ‘The Cultural Turn in Post-3.11 Documentary: Kamanaka Hitomi’s Accented Documentary’, in A Companion to Japanese Cinema, John Wiley&Sons, ed. David Desser (Croydon, 2022), 639.

[32] Kyoko Hirano, ‘311: Documenting a Catastrophe as a National Experience’, Rethinking History 18, no. 3 (2014): 379, https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2014.898418.

[33] Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima: Perspectives on Nuclear Disasters (Amsterdam University Press, 2023).

[34] Élise Domenach, Le paradigme Fukushima au cinéma : ce que voir veut dire  (2011-2013) [The Fukushima Paradigm: What Seing Means (2011-2013)] (Mimésis, 2022).

[35] Wada-Marciano, ‘The Cultural Turn in Post-3.11 Documentary’, 639–40.

[36] Hirano, ‘311’, 378.

[37] Laurent Jullier, ‘Devant Les Images de l’horreur [Facing Images of Horror]’, Esprit, no. 291 (1) (2003): 108. Jullier pointed out that plastic beauty, such as in Eugene Smith’s photos of the victims of the Minamata disease, can be a hindrance to actual intervention.

[38] Marco Bohr, ‘Naoya Hatakeyama and the Photographic Representation of Post-Tsunami Landscapes in Japan’, Loughborough’s Research Repository, 2019, 4–5.

[39] Anne-Lise Mithout, ‘“We reject egotism in the disguise of love”: the ethics of care of the Japanese Disability right movement’, in Asia in care, ed. Myriam de Loenzien and Aurélie Varrel (CNRS Editions, 2025), 182–83.

[40] Saeko Kimura, Theorizing Post-Disaster Literature in Japan: Revisiting the Literary and Cultural Landscape After the Triple Disasters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).

[41] Atsushi Sasaki, Eiga yo sayōnara [Farewell, Cinema] (Film Art, 2022), 250.

[42] Official website: https://komori-seo.main.jp/blog/biography/  (last consultation on 10 June 2025).

[43] According to NOOK’s official website: http://nook.or.jp/hp/ (last consultation on 10 June 2025).

[44] Haruka Komori et al., ‘Noto hantō no jishin to gōu no ato o kirokusuru. Kokoromi no hajimari [Documenting the Noto Peninsula after the Earthquake and the Torrential Rain Disaster. First Attempts]’, YouTube Live – ‘Noto Records’ Channel, 11 December 2024.

[45] Official website: https://asttr.jp/about/index.html (last consultation on 10 June 2025). Updates to the site ended as of 30 June 2021. The project led to the publication of several books; its website is archived on the Web Archiving Project of the National Diet Library: https://warp.ndl.go.jp/waid/20001 (last consultation on 12 May 2025).

[46] Official website: https://www.rekibun.or.jp/en/ (last consultation on 10 June 2025).

[47] Komori et al., ‘Noto hantō no jishin to gōu no ato o kirokusuru’.

[48] ‘Haruka Komori in conversation with Lucie Rydzek’, 24 February 2024.

[49] The seminar’s page on TARL: https://tarl.jp/projects/newroute-seminar/ (last consultation on 27 May 2025).

[50] “Recorder 311” is a project organised by the Mediatheque of Sendai in which Komori took part. It aims to produce citizen archives by encouraging artists and non-artists to create around the theme of 311.

[51] Sasaki, Eiga yo sayōnara.

[52] ‘Haruka Komori in conversation with Lucie Rydzek’.

[53] The book was first self-published under the title “Double Layered Town – 2031, A Landscape that Someone may see somewhere” in 2017 (Nijū no machi: 2031 nen, dokoka de dareka ga miru kamomshirenai fūkei). It then contained seven of the forty-one illustrations coming from Seo’s exhibition “Kuriteriumu 91 Seto Natsumi: Nami no shita, tsuchi no ue / Nijū no machi” at Mito Contemporary Art Gallery from November 2015 to January 2016. The publication of the book in 2021 by Shoshō Kankanbō included thirty-nine illustrations and two more texts: “Kōtaichi no uta” (Song of the Transitory Land), written after hearing the 2018 workshop’s participants, and “Hokōroku – 2019 nen 3 gatsu” (Walking Journal – March 2019), which is a compilation of her Twitter (now X) posts. Nakashima, ‘Hisaichi No Fukkō’, 5.

[54] These distinctions between “Fieldwork”, “Discussion”, and “Feedback” are suggested by Sasaki, Eiga yo sayōnara.

[55] Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso Books, 2012), 2; quoted in Zhong Mengual, L’art en commun, 12.

[56] Kumakura and Nagatsu, An Overview of Art Projects in Japan, 29.

[57] Zhong Mengual, L’art en commun, 59–60.

[58] Nakashima, ‘Hisaichi No Fukkō’, 7–10.

[59] Before the film was made, Seo already orchestrated several reading sessions and discussions around the book in Tōkyō, Kōbe, Niigata and Hiroshima. Seo, Awai yuku koro, 342.

[60] Aya Motegi, ‘Memory and Oblivion of Catastrophes: Landscapes in Contemporary Japanese Films’, Conference ‘Uncertain Landscapes’: Representations and Practices of Space in the Age of the Anthropocene, Doctoral College of Strasbourg, 21 October 2022.

[61] Lefebvre, ‘Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema’, 20–23.

[62] ‘Introduction’, in Paysages inhumains [Inhuman Landscapes], ed. Hélène Schmutz et al. (Presses de l’Université Savoie Mont Blanc, 2021), 7.

[63] Lefebvre, ‘Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema’, 53.

[64] ‘Haruka Komori in conversation with Lucie Rydzek’.

[65] Tarō Aoyama addresses this issue by coining the concept of “the middle voice in multiple gazes” (fukume-teki chūdōtai) in his general theory of “mediopassive” filmmaking. Tarō Aoyama, Chūdōtai no eizōgaku: Higashi nihon daishinsai o kiroku suru sakkatachi no seiseihenka [Science of Mediopassive Images: the Becoming of 3.11 Documentary Filmmakers], Horinouchi Shuppan (Hachiōji-shi, 2022), 349.

[66] ‘Natsumi Seo in Conversation with Aya Motegi and Lucie Rydzek’, 23 May 2025.

[67] Nakashima, ‘Hisaichi No Fukkō’, 5.

[68] Aoyama, Chūdōtai no eizōgaku, 170.

[69] Martini and Minca use these words to describe one of the positive aspects of tourism in disaster-stricken areas (especially in the case of cross-cultural interactions). Annaclaudia Martini and Claudio Minca, ‘Affective Dark Tourism Encounters: Rikuzentakata after the 2011 Great East Japan Disaster’, Social & Cultural Geography 22, no. 1 (2021): 17, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1550804.

[70] Irena Latek et al., eds., In Situ-de Visu-in Motu: Architecture, Cinema and the Technological Arts (Infolio, 2014), 15–16.

[71] Kumakura and Nagatsu, An Overview of Art Projects in Japan, 33.

---

References

Aoyama, Tarō. Chūdōtai no eizōgaku: Higashi nihon daishinsai o kiroku suru sakkatachi no seiseihenka [Science of Mediopassive Images: the Becoming of 3.11 Documentary Filmmakers]. Hachiōji-shi: Horinouchi Shuppan, 2022.

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso Books, 2012.

Bohr, Marco. “Naoya Hatakeyama and the Photographic Representation of Post-Tsunami Landscapes in Japan.” Loughborough’s Research Repository, 2019.

Bordwell, David, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2019.

Borisovskaya, K. A., and S. A. Risinson. “Cinema as a Modern Trend of the Territory Branding Development.” Kubik, 2019, 17–19.

Brédif, Hervé. Réaliser la terre: prise en charge du vivant et contrat territorial [Embracing the Earth: Managing the Living and Territorial Pact]. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021.

Burch, Noël. Life to Those Shadows. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps [Cinema 2: Time-image]. Paris: Minuit, 1985.

DiNitto, Rachel. “Narrating the Cultural Trauma of 3/11: The Debris of Post-Fukushima Literature and Film.” Japan Forum 26, no. 3 (2014): 340–60.

Domenach, Élise. Le paradigme Fukushima au cinéma : ce que voir veut dire  (2011-2013) [The Fukushima Paradigm: What Seing Means (2011-2013)]. Paris: Mimésis, 2022.

Droin, Nicolas, and Mélanie Forret, eds. Écrire la ville au cinéma: traces, mouvements, imbrications [Writing the City in Cinema: Traces, Movements, Interconnections]. Saint-Danis: Presses universitaires de Vincennes, 2022.

Gerster, Julia. “Beneath the Invisible Cloud. Kamishibai After 11 March: Between Disaster Risk Education and Memorialisation.” Amfiteater (Ljubljana) 7, no. 1 (2019): 64–83.

Groening, Stephen. Cinema Beyond Territory. British Film Institute, 2014. https://www.torrossa.com/en/resources/an/5203219.

Hirano, Kyoko. “311: Documenting a Catastrophe as a National Experience.” Rethinking History 18, no. 3 (2014): 378–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2014.898418.

Holmberg, Ryan. “Overview: In The Aftermath.” ARTnews.Com, 21 April 2016. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/overview-in-the-aftermath-62150/.

Jullier, Laurent. “Devant Les Images de l’horreur [Facing Images of Horror].” Esprit, no. 291 (1) (2003): 84–109.

Kajiya, Kenji. “Japanese Art Projects in History.” Field 7 (Spring 2017). https://field-journal.com/issue-7/japanese-art-projects-in-history/.

Kimura, Saeko. Theorizing Post-Disaster Literature in Japan: Revisiting the Literary and Cultural Landscape After the Triple Disasters. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.

Komori, Haruka, and Natsumi Seo. “File 11. Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi: tabibito toshite kairo o tsukuru [File 11. Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi: Opening New Routes as Travelers].” YouTube, Tokyo Art Research Lab Channel, August 11, 2023. https://youtu.be/M6kiOigzUpA.

Kumakura, Sumiko, and Yuichiro Nagatsu. An Overview of Art Projects in Japan: A Society That Co-Creates with Art. Tokyo Art Research Lab (Tokyo University of the Arts), 2015. https://docslib.org/doc/91818/art-projects-in-japan-a-society-that-co-creates-with-art.

Latek, Irena, Sophie Paviol, Clotilde Simond, and Françoise Very, eds. In Situ-de Visu-in Motu: Architecture, Cinema and the Technological Arts. Gollion: Infolio, 2014.

Lefebvre, Martin. “Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema.” In Landscape and Film, edited by Martin Lefebvre. AFI Film Readers. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Martini, Annaclaudia, and Claudio Minca. “Affective Dark Tourism Encounters: Rikuzentakata after the 2011 Great East Japan Disaster.” Social & Cultural Geography 22, no. 1 (2021): 33–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1550804.

Matsuura, Yūsuke. “Kioku media toshite no saigai ikō: 3.11 no kiokujutsu [Memory Media as vestiges of disasters: Memorial Techniques of 3.11].” In Posuto san ten ichi ichi media gensetsu saikō [Reflexions on post-3.11 Mediatic Discourses], edited by Marciano Wada-Mitsuyo. Tykyo: Presses de l’Université de Hōsei, 2019.

Mithout, Anne-Lise. ‘“We reject egotism in the disguise of love”: the ethics of care of the Japanese Disability right movement.” In Asia in care, edited by Myriam de Loenzien and Aurélie Varrel. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2025.

Morice, Jean-René, Jean-Claude Taddei, Isabelle Van Peteghem-Treard, and Claude-Éric Poiroux, eds. Territoires Du Cinéma [Territories of Cinema]. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2017.

Nakashima, Kōji. “Hisaichi No Fukkō o Meguru Basho No Sōshitsu to Saikōchiku: Seo Natsumi “nijū No Machi” o Yomu [Loss and Reconstruction of Places in Rikuzentakata: Reading Natsumi Seo’s “Nijyuu No Machi”].” Space, Society and Geographical Thought, no. 25 (2022): 3–16.

Nozach, Delphine Le. “The “placement” of territory in films. Statuses, modalities, and ways of presenting territories in films.” Communication & langages 202, no. 4 (2019): 25–38.

Orueta, Agustín Gámir, and Carlos Manuel Valdés. “Cinema and Geography: Geographic Space, Landscape and Territory in the Film Industry.” Boletín de La Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles, no. 45 (2007): 157–90.

Painter, Joe. “Rethinking Territory.” Antipode 42, no. 5 (2010): 1090–118. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00795.x.

Rueda, Amanda. “Festival de cinéma : Médiations et construction de Territoires imaginaires [Film Festival: Mediations and Construction of Imaginary Territories].” Culture & Musées 14, no. 1 (2009): 149–71. https://doi.org/10.3406/pumus.2009.1512.

Sasaki, Atsushi. Eiga yo sayōnara [Farewell, Cinema]. Tokyo: Film Art, 2022.

Schmutz, Hélène, Olivier Chavanon, Emilie-Anne Pépy, and Dominique Pety, eds. “Introduction.” In Paysages inhumains [Inhuman Landscapes]. Chambéry: Presses de l’Université Savoie Mont Blanc, 2021.

Seo, Natsumi. Awai yuku koro : Rikuzentakata shinsaigo wo ikiru [In-between times: living in Rikuzentakata after the disaster]. Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 2019.

Takehisa, Yū. “After the Exhibition Artists and the Disaster: Documentation in Progress.” Translated by Justin Jesty. FIELD Issue 7 ‘Japan’s Social Turn Vol. 1’ (2017). https://field-journal.com/issue-7/after-the-exhibition-artists-and-the-disaster-documentation-in-progress.

Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. Japanese Filmmakers in the Wake of Fukushima: Perspectives on Nuclear Disasters. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.

Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo. “The Cultural Turn in Post-3.11 Documentary: Kamanaka Hitomi’s Accented Documentary.” In A Companion to Japanese Cinema,  edited by David Desser. Croydon: John Wiley&Sons, 2022.

Weisenfeld, Gennifer. “Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923.” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 13, no. 4 (2015): 1–13.

Yoshizawa, Yayoi. “Heisei 27 Nendo Sōgō Bunka Kenkyūjo Kenkyūjosei “Āatsu Kaunshiru to Bunka Seisaku” Ni Kansuru Hōkoku [2015 Report on “The Cultural Policy of the Arts Council” with Research Support from the Arts and Sciences Laborator].” Bulletin of Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Science and Culture, Kyoritsu Women’s University & Junior College, no. 23 (February 2017): 219–22.

Zhong Mengual, Estelle. L’art en commun: réinventer les formes du collectif en contexte démocratique [Art in Common: Reinventing Forms of the Collective in a Democratic Context]. Dijon: Presses du réel, 2018.

 

Filmography

Happy Hour (Happī awā), dir. Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Japan: Kōbe Workshop Cinema Project, 2015, 317’, Fiction film.

Listening to the Air (Sora ni kiku), dir. Haruka Komori, Japan: TOFOO, 2018, 73’, Documentary.

The Double Layered Town / Making A Song To Replace Our Positions (Nijū no machi: kōtaichi no uta o amu), dir. Haruka Komori and Natsumi Seo, Japan: TOFOO, 2019, 79’, Documentary.

Under the Wave, On the Ground (Nami no shita, tsuchi no ue), dir. Haruka Komori and Natsumi Seo, Japan, 2014, 68′, Documentary.

 

Biography

Lucie Rydzek is a PhD candidate in Film Studies and lecturer at the University of Lorraine (Metz, France), member of the Research Center on Expertise, Arts and Transitions (CREAT), and associate member of the Lyon Institute of East Asian Studies. Her thesis is supervised by Prof. Fabrice Montebello (University of Lorraine) and Prof. Élise Domenach (ENS Louis Lumière) and focuses on territories in Japanese cinema after the Fukushima crisis (2011–) and during the Covid-19 crisis (2020–23). In 2023–24, she benefited from a research stay at the University of Nagoya under the supervision of Prof. Fujiki Hideaki. In 2024, she published the chapter “The COVID-19 Crisis in Japan: Impacts on the Film Industry and the Emergence of New Collectives for Independent Filmmaking and Film Diversity” (Resonances of Japanese Cinemas, Jaime López Díez ed).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v22.i0.2967

Introduction

Abbas Kiarostami’s second film, Recess (1972), is a short film that follows a schoolboy who, after kicking a group of children’s ball, is chased and forced to take an unfamiliar route home. He ends up on the outskirts, eventually reaching a highway. Already in this early film, the themes of getting lost, the struggle to find one’s way, and the broader significance of space and place emerge as central concerns in Kiarostami’s cinema – later explored masterfully in the Koker trilogy, Taste of Cherry (1997), and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). The Koker trilogy is anchored in northern Iran’s rural landscapes, beginning with Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), which follows a child’s urgent journey along zigzagging mountain paths to return a notebook – a quest that unfolds as an ethical odyssey. Its sequel, And Life Goes On (1992), follows a filmmaker navigating the devastation after an earthquake in the region, as he searches for the two young actors from Where Is the Friend’s House? Through the Olive Trees (1994) presents parallel quests: a director pursuing cinematic truth and an actor yearning for love, expanding a minor detail from And Life Goes On into its central narrative. Beyond the trilogy, Taste of Cherry follows a suicidal man on his circular drives through dust-choked construction sites as he searches for someone to assist in his suicide. Finally, The Wind Will Carry Us documents a journalist’s failed attempt to film a village mourning ritual, where labyrinthine alleys and the serpentine access road interact with the psychological space of the protagonist, challenging the very notions of centre and periphery, as well as on-screen and off-screen space – categories shaped by his initially limited gaze. Key figures such as the dying woman and the unseen ditch-digger remain off-screen throughout, drawing attention to what lies beyond the frame and prompting a gradual reorientation of the protagonist’s way of looking – an aspect that will be examined more closely in the following parts of the article.

Through the network of roads and paths that traverse them, spaces – whether natural, rural, or peripheral – acquire aesthetic and ontological significance in these films, foregrounding themes such as the relationship between nature and art and life as a journey. As Jonathan Rosenbaum observes, “[t]he difficulty of finding one’s way to a given location, which in Where Is the Friend’s House? is equated with the difficulty of being and remaining ethical, […] and because of the way Kiarostami’s heroes repeatedly ask themselves, ‘Where am I?’ or ‘Where am I going?’ the more existential questions of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I doing?’ are never far away”. [1] This paper maps the spatial regimes and structures in these films to show how Kiarostami’s ontological aesthetic foregrounds the continuous creation and de-creation of space of being. It begins by examining the interplay of interiority and exteriority, with particular attention to the car as a dispositif that frames the gaze and mediates between psychological and physical space. The analysis then turns to Kiarostami’s use of nature – both as landscape and narrative space – to interrogate the relation between art and nature. To do so – and as a necessary detour – it first examines the visual discourse of his films through the question of gaze in its multiple layers, a question inseparable from the art-nature dynamic, since in Kiarostami’s films landscape and nature are first approached as components of a visual discourse, reflecting art, before becoming materially entangled with the narrative, reflecting nature. Building on this, the analysis engages with how winding paths in Kiarostami’s films function to superimpose art onto nature and fiction onto documentary, a process explored through Gaston Bachelard’s notion of graft. The article then considers the motif of ruins and treasures, showing how spatially destructive event of the earthquake in Kiarostami’s cinema, creates cracks and fissures that are not just obstacles but necessary generative voids within his aesthetic. Finally, drawing on Bachelard’s material imagination, these threads are synthesised through an examination of liquification – a process enacted by the protagonists’ repetitive, labyrinthine journeys that erode their rigid, earth-like fixations. This transformative shift towards the fluidity of water culminates in a Bachelardian roundness of being, a state achieved through the recursive, spiraling movement between interior and exterior, self and world.

 

Interiority and Exteriority

As an art of movement, cinema inevitably engages with space, both as a precondition and a product of motion. This dynamic relationship gives rise to diverse spatial forms within cinematic expression. In the introduction to his book Negative Space, Manny Farber outlines the three most important types of cinematic spaces, arguing, “There are several types of movie space, the three most important being: (1) the field of the screen, (2) the psychological space of the actor, and (3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers.” [2] Entangled together, these three types of spaces assume a formative role in the narratives of Kiarostami’s films, becoming a primary focus. First, there are the films’ locations: vast and open spaces ranging from cultivated rural landscapes to barren wastelands. Second, there is the psychological space of the characters; self-contained, closed, and secretive spaces that are often figuratively and cinematically externalised through serpentine paths as traces of the interaction between interior and the material spaces. Third, and most significantly, there is the interior space of the car that functions as a liminal space – physically embedded within the expansive landscapes (the first type), yet simultaneously encapsulating and shielding the psychological realm of the characters (the second type). Kiarostami’s avoidance of interior spaces in these films finds a counterpart in the interior space of cars. The car’s recurring presence in these films does not merely reflect a stylistic dispositif of Kiarostami’s cinema, but a narrative and spatial necessity. He does not make home movies but moving homes – a mobile interiority within exteriority. These closed, transitional spaces restrict the gaze while opening up to external landscapes, framing them through windows and mirrors, much like cinema itself. By focusing on this interplay between interior and exterior in the car, I aim to show how such spaces carry both narrative and stylistic weight in Kiarostami’s work, moving beyond prevalent socio-spatial readings that frame the car as a site of negotiated publicness and privacy. [3]

In his interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, Kiarostami explains the idea of using cars in his films:

The car is quite simply a beautiful idea. It’s not just a means of transportation to go from one place to another; it also represents a small house, a very intimate space with a large window whose view changes at every moment. You will never find such a house in real life, because the view from a house’s windows never changes. It is condemned to show the same view forever. Whereas the window of a car is large and, moreover, like a widescreen cinema screen, it reflects movement. [4]

This notion of moving views, in contrast to static ones, introduces one of the fundamental differences between space and place as explored by Yi-Fu Tuan, who writes: “The ideas ‘space’ and ‘place’ require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.” [5] While traversing space, cars create a dialectic: their static cabins offer place-like stability amid spatial flow, even as their movement perpetually reconfigures the very space they traverse, resolving Tuan’s duality of movement and pause. In Kiarostami’s films, the moving vehicle thus functions as a double agent, simultaneously producing space and place through its movement. On the other hand, there is the psychological space of the characters – or what might be called the mental space – which reveals itself through extended dialogues within moving cars. Literally and figuratively speaking, cars possess no memory – they continually forget the paths they traverse. Roads and paths, by contrast, become the earth’s engraved memories of journeys taken. It could be argued that, thanks to cars, Kiarostami’s narratives simultaneously move in two opposite ways; they tend to retain the traces of a story while constantly erasing them. This is explicitly portrayed in two opposite narrative regimes coexisting in his films: the main spatio-temporal movement of the narrative, presented through the main character’s search for someone or something, and the minor events/impasses/detours they encounter – acting like a countercurrent in a river that hinders and erases traces of the main movement, pushing it back and forcing it to repeat itself. In this regard, cars take on another figural function as they constantly open onto new perspectives through the windshield while preserving traces of taken paths in their rear and side mirrors – a duality frequently visualised in his films.

As Maria Irene Aparício observes, “one can assume that Kiarostami deals with spirals of life and memory, (re)presenting both real places and their inmost poetic ‘different spaces’, or heterotopias.” [6] These “heterotopias” – a term drawn from Foucault to describe spaces that are simultaneously real and symbolic, grounded and transgressive – help name the dual nature of Kiarostami’s settings. This spatial duality is also stylistically respected in his trilogy, where each film’s story is taken up in the next one – either as follow-up or closer examination of neglected minor stories that remained off-screen. Underlining these hybrid spaces, Aparício writes: “These geographical, but also mental places, take the sense of the cross-paths which interfere with life and death – including the director’s path through life.” [7] This observation crystallises the films’ spatial paradox: Kiarostami’s landscapes function simultaneously as physical terrains and metaphysical thresholds, and their artistic blending inevitably raises broader questions about the relationship between nature and art.

 

Nature and Art

The notions of space and landscape bring forth the much-discussed idea of the gaze in Kiarostami’s films. While scholars such as Negar Mottahedeh have read the rural spaces in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema as a strategic response to censorship – enabling the depiction of women in outdoor spaces without violating the modesty code – the focus here is not on the socio-political rationale for such settings, but on the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities they open up in Kiarostami’s work. [8] In this sense, his artistic preference for natural and rural settings appears rooted in two fundamental principles related to perceptual and spatial possibilities. First, nature and landscapes inherently embody the question of gaze – they are not passive backdrops but active participants in visual discourse, constituting a reciprocal relationship between observer and environment. Second, by reducing settings to elemental forms (earth, sky, wind, paths) and presenting a primordial vision, Kiarostami strips away distractions that obscure visual perception. This minimalism lays bare – both literally and figuratively – the fundamental tensions between art and nature. To properly examine this relationship, we must first explore nature’s stylistic significance in his films – an importance that prevents its reduction to mere backdrop or setting. In his Letter to Serge Daney, Gilles Deleuze outlines various historical conceptions of the relationship between art and nature and traces their logical reverberations throughout the history of cinema. Drawing on art historian Alois Riegl’s categories of beautification, spiritualisation, and competition with Nature, Deleuze identifies a shift in cinema’s function. He suggests that classical cinema asked “What is there to see behind the image?” – a visual mode in which meaning unfolds through successive images forming an organic whole. After the Second World War, this gave way to a new question: “What is there to see on the surface of the image?” – a transition that “changed all the relations between cinematic images.” [9] This transition, marked by the Second World War, profoundly altered not only cinematic form – including the shift from movement-image to time-image – but also the spectator’s relation to the image, shifting the emphasis from discovery to endurance, from relational depth to exposed surface, and from mere seeing to a critical engagement with the act of looking and its modalities.

What is there to see on the surface of the image? Kiarostami reimagines this secondary function of the image in a singular way. I turn briefly here to the question of gaze because I contend that it is through these modes of looking that Kiarostami redefines what the image can reveal or withhold, including the spatial configuration of his films, onto which these images open and through which the discussion of art and nature will be pursued in detail. His films stage three distinct gazes: the goal-oriented gaze, the gaze of narrative, and nature’s gaze. The goal-oriented gaze is fixated on endpoints, blind to what lies between – a forgetful and negligent gaze (e.g. the gaze of urban characters in rural spaces, like Behzad in The Wind Will Carry Us; and the filmmaker’s gaze in And Life Goes On). On the other hand, the gaze of narrative is attuned to preserving traces, one that – aligned with the narrative movement discussed earlier – compels the prior gaze into cycles of repetition and self-correction, ultimately educating it. And lastly, nature’s gaze, existing beyond the standard shot-reverse-shot structure, appears in long shots where car passengers converse while the camera observes from a hillside (e.g. Taste of Cherry and the opening of The Wind Will Carry Us). In Through the Olive Trees, this perspective becomes the director’s gaze from the first scene, later mirrored in the POV shot of the director character watching Hossein follow Tahereh along the zigzag path. Kiarostami portrays the interplay of these three gazes at least in three ways. In Through the Olive Trees, he makes off-screen space the film’s central subject: what was previously unseen in And Life Goes On. In The Wind Will Carry Us, Kiarostami reflects on his own gaze as a director through the character of Behzad, whose way of observing others exposes the limits and implications of such a narrowly focused perspective. In Taste of Cherry, set against dust-choked construction sites – barren, anti-productive spaces – the gaze, deprived of its object, gives way to a new mode of looking through narrative repetition. Emerging amid spring blossoms, the latter breaks from the primary camera’s perspective – elevated yet mediated by an intimate video image.

Indeed, Kiarostami transforms the question “What is there to see on the surface of the image?” into an inquiry about the gaze itself – or rather, about how to look. He spiritualises not only nature but also the act of looking. As Deleuze puts it, this is “a visionary cinema that no longer sets out in any sense to beautify nature but spiritualizes it in the most intense way. How can we wonder what there is to see behind an image (or following on from it . . .), when we can’t even see what’s in it or on the surface until we look with our mind’s eye?” [10] [author’s emphasis] As noted earlier, Deleuze’s reflections are rooted in the historical context of the Second World War; I argue that Kiarostami rethinks and extends those questions by interweaving art and nature through the mediating act of looking. Jean-Luc Nancy highlights how Kiarostami’s films often present the screen as a look onto the world – whether through the recurring motif of doors left ajar in Where Is My Friend’s Home?, or the framing of car windows in And Life Goes On and Taste of Cherry, which mark his emphasis on film as a way of looking – taken as a verb as well as a noun implying the subjective and objective essence of the act. [11] As Nancy writes: “In the cinematic box that looks, the gaze no longer faces a representation or a spectacle from the outset, but first (and yet without suppressing the spectacle) it fits into a way of looking: the filmmaker’s. Along those lines, at the beginning of Through the Olive Trees, the actor who plays the filmmaker introduces himself and gives his name facing us and looking at us. Our gaze matches his as if it followed in his steps.” [12] Nancy’s insight clarifies how Kiarostami foregrounds the gaze as both a structuring device and an ethical position – initially aligned with the filmmaker’s own act of looking.

Likewise, the French film critic Alain Bergala highlights an important moment at the end of The Wind Will Carry Us when Behzad, the main character, throws a bucket of water onto the windshield of his car where “only after two hours of film, […] do we realize that Kiarostami, contrary to his habit, has not filmed the road a single time through that windshield, from the driver’s point of view.” [13] Referring to Behzad’s near-sightedness, Bergala calls this act “a re-education of seeing”, which reflects the act of bringing the edges into the visual field. [14]  However, the relationship between art and nature in Kiarostami’s films is not solely a matter of the gaze – specifically its limitations and eventual re-education. The very act of looking establishes a distance between the viewer and what is seen, reinforcing a separation between subject and object that the films subtly question. As the famous zigzag paths in his films suggest (especially in the Koker trilogy), this relationship goes beyond the simple interaction between a fabricated, imagined world and a natural one. These paths, carefully carved into the hills by the film crew, reflect the blending of documentary and fiction in Kiarostami’s films, suggesting the documentary quality of nature and the fictive nature of the film art. It is as though fiction becomes superimposed upon documentary – both literally and figuratively – in a dialectical interplay where each layer exposes rather than obscures the other. In his book Water and Dreams (1983), about the material imagination of water, Bachelard uses the botanical term of “graft” to explain the internal relationship between nature and human imagination. As he succinctly phrases it, “art is grafted nature.” [15] He goes on explaining that “[t]he graft seems to be a concept essential for understanding human psychology. In my opinion it is the human stamp, the specifying mark of the human imagination. In my view, mankind imagining is the transcendent aspect of natura naturans. It is the graft which can truly provide the material imagination with an exhuberance [sic] of forms, which can transmit the richness and density of matter to formal imagination.” [16] [author’s emphasis] This notion resonates deeply with Kiarostami’s own understanding of his practice. In a letter to Kamran Shirdel, the Iranian filmmaker best known for his documentary work, Kiarostami writes: “For years I have been grafting my fictional cinema to the documentary cinema so that I may benefit from its humanist prestige.”[17] Fiction and documentary in his work do not merely coexist – they generate a third space in which the real and the imagined are mutually implicated. The concept of grafting thus becomes not only a metaphor for aesthetic hybridity, but a structuring principle through which Kiarostami navigates the intersection of natural reality and artistic invention.

Along the same lines, in her study of Kiarostami’s zigzag paths, Joan Copjec argues that Kiarostami’s artificial landscape in the Koker trilogy echoes a 14th-century Shiraz miniature, A Paradise Garden (Persian miniature, c. 1300, unknown artist), depicting a winding, serpentine path cutting through a yellow-toned hillside, leading to a solitary flowering tree.[18] According to Copjec, Henry Corbin, the influential Iranologist, celebrated this miniature as the quintessential representation of “visionary geography”, a concept central to his notion of the “imaginal world” as an intermediary space. Unlike natural geography, this intermediary realm exists between abstraction and sensory reality, where “matter is immaterialized and spirit corporealized”. [19] The imaginal world in Kiarostami’s films is not another world above this one, but, in Copjec’s terms, “the imaginal world names the ‘other world’ within this one.” [20] The superimposition, the graft, and the imaginal world all suggest that the primordial natural settings in Kiarostami’s films, in a sense, pose the question of art and nature in regard to the notion of imitation (i.e. art imitates nature) as the predominant philosophical idea in antiquity. [21]

Indeed, it can be argued that Kiarostami’s films suggest that the relationship between art and nature is one of interiority, not exteriority. Art neither imitates nature nor beautifies it any more. In this regard, apart from superimposing the two worlds of nature and art, he incorporates this very question of copy and original in his films’ narratives and figural imagery. Towards the end of And Life Goes On, the principal character, Farhad, picks up two boys on his way to Koker, who bear all the signs of the two boys he is searching for – yet they are not the ones. In Through the Olive Trees, Hossein, before winning Tahereh’s heart, plays the role of her husband in the film-within-the-film. In Taste of Cherry, Mr. Badii witnesses his own burial when he sees his shadow cast on the wall where the loaders dump dirt. He then sits beneath the falling dust, moments before a worker calls out to him twice – exactly as he had imagined in his planned suicide. Given that the final narrative resolutions always remain off-screen (as we never know what Tahereh’s final answer to Hossein is, we never get to see whether Farhad gets to find the two children he is looking for, or whether Mr. Badii successfully commits suicide, etc.), they are all examples of the process of prefiguration in his work which reflect the question of original and copy, difference and repetition, both as a narrative trompe-l’œil and a figural strategy. This brings the two supposedly distinct fields onto one single layer. That is, the imaginal world – or the aesthetic activity as described by Friedrich Schelling, a 19th-century German philosopher – ultimately identifies the unconscious activity of nature and the conscious activity of human being. Camilla Flodin, drawing on Schelling, describes this unity as a process “through which art is created, and which can also be experienced by the recipients of the created artwork. Art is thus the medium joining the conscious and the unconscious activities, and the artwork as manifest object is able to reflect something that otherwise remains inaccessible.” [22] This reflection is embedded in the twofold structure of And Life Goes On, when in a revealing moment, Mr. Ruhi (the elderly man from Where Is the Friend’s House?) protests being portrayed as older than his actual age in the previous film. Later, he further destabilises cinematic truth by revealing that neither the house shown in the current film nor the one featured previously was his actual residence. Farhad’s ironic retort – that the house’s survival of the earthquake is itself a factual reality – perfectly encapsulates Kiarostami’s complex interplay between artifice and actuality. This exchange brilliantly demonstrates how the director negotiates the dialectic of interiority between artistic representation and natural reality.

 

Ruins and Treasures

In the Koker trilogy, nature frequently blocks the way – both literally by obstructing roads and paths, and figuratively by impeding the narrative’s movement. The film And Life Goes On engages most directly with the nature-art dialectic, where natural forces physically obstruct progress – through earthquake-induced road cracks, dislodged boulders, and steep hills that interrupt the car’s movement – thereby reinforcing the separation between art and nature. As Graig Uhlin observes, this film is as much about the elemental earth as it is about the director’s visit to the village of Koker, writing “elemental earth asserts its primacy by unsettling socio-cultural forms that assume this earth as a stable background condition. Seismic movement rattles or even ruptures the narrational frames that separate the fictional from the real, as well as art from nature.” [23] Once more, art is literally superimposed upon nature in this film as in a famous scene, we see a wall-mounted picture that is torn by the earthquake precisely along the same fissure line as the wall’s crack. As Uhlin points out, the earthquake “makes representation falter. […] By means of this crack, earth juts through the image, and since it runs through both picture and wall, it disrupts the separation between figure and ground, between an image (the print) and its material support (the wall). Elemental earth acts as a vortical force breaking free from the stability of form.” [24] Kiarostami has often mentioned his taste in making works of art that are not fully accomplished. He has shown distaste towards films with a seamless structure that have no empty spaces, no doors left ajar for the spectator to step in and collaborate to sew the pieces of film together. In an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, Kiarostami states “For the centenary of cinema two years ago, I gave you a text that you published, in which I said that filmmakers should leave their films unfinished so that viewers could complete them and bring their own imagination to them.” [25] Accordingly, the ruins and rubble left by the earthquake, particularly in And Life Goes On, and other related motifs in his following films (the dream of a house and the collective homelessness in Through the Olive Trees, the dusty construction site in the outskirts of the city in Taste of Cherry, as well as the excavation in The Wind Will Carry Us, etc.) assume a double function: they not only obstruct narrative progression, compelling characters to find alternate paths, but also provide the structural cracks and holes in the body of the films, necessary for a Kiarostami film to be made. Indeed, the crack in the earth creates a crack in his aesthetic, reopening – at yet another level – the perpetual interrogation of nature and art. In her co-authored book with Rosenbaum, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa examines Kiarostami’s deployment of ruins – tracing their cinematic significance to their enduring presence in Iranian visual and literary traditions – noting:

These are not only images of devastation but also sites where treasures might be found, whether these are the valuable objects retrieved from the wrecked village or the thighbone dug out of the cemetery. These images are staples of Iranian cinema and literature […] these ruins are set against a fantasy of heaven or the promised land embodied in the village and the surrounding landscape. Behzad [in The Wind Will Carry Us] even jokingly alludes to this when he suggests the fantasy of buried treasure as an expedient cover story. [26]

This treasure could aptly describe the work of art as conceived through Kiarostami’s stylistic interplay of creative and destructive forces of nature within his aesthetic vision. As Uhlin puts it, these forces “repeatedly upsurge to trouble his characters, to propel but also block their movements, to provide shelter to them but also to crush them under its weight. These agencies are both world-ordering and world-destroying – bearing ontological significance. In an intermedial encounter, film is brought down to earth, and the earth is rendered cinematic.” [27] In this light, the ruin becomes a privileged site in Kiarostami’s cinema – where art, like buried treasure, is unearthed not in spite of destruction but through it, paradoxically entwining the destructive force of nature with the creative impulse of art.

 

Self and Nature

Kiarostami’s films frequently centre on characters driven by an idée fixe – often a search for someone or something – that remains ultimately unattainable within the temporal bounds of the film. Instead of fulfilling this quest, the characters encounter a host of seemingly marginal people and situations, initially perceived as trivial or irrelevant to their plan. This detour from the primary objective becomes central to the narrative, suggesting that the off-screen space in Kiarostami’s work is not merely a spatial notion but functions as a narrative principle, where narrative emerges from what lies beyond the immediate frame of intention and visibility. It seems like what François Truffaut once wrote about Jean Renoir applies word for word to Kiarostami, despite the two being very different filmmakers with entirely distinct styles and aesthetics. Truffaut writes “Renoir does not film ideas, but men and women who have ideas, and he does not invite us to adopt these ideas or to sort them out no matter how quaint or illusory they may be, but simply to respect them.” [28] In Kiarostami’s films – particularly those under discussion – two spaces, embodying opposing forces that pull the narrative in divergent directions, remain in constant tension. The filmic space (where the narrative unfolds: nature and serpentine paths) actively disrupts the psychological space of ideas, the latter often retreating into the shelter of cars. These detours are imposed by the former, with the two spaces alternately circumscribing one another in a struggle for narrative control. This is epitomised literally in the road blockages discussed earlier, and figuratively in car scenes (in And Life Goes On and Taste of Cherry) where characters converse while the camera frames their winding path in high-angle long shots – their voices seeping through the image as if ideas overcome physical space. This suggests a narcissistic subjectivity in Kiarostami’s protagonists, at times bordering on solipsism. Mr. Badii, in Taste of Cherry, obsessively seeks someone to assist his suicide. Farhad in And Life Goes On focuses solely on finding his former child actors. Hossein and the director in Through the Olive Trees mirror each other – one pursuing Tahereh’s affection, the other his film. Behzad, in The Wind Will Carry Us, is clearly near-sighted – a subtle marker of his limited perspective – and stubbornly seeks documenting village mourning rituals. All treat their surroundings as mere objects – sometimes obstacles, sometimes paths – to their fixed goals, remaining oblivious to their surroundings. Highlighting the qualitative distinction between these two spaces in an interview with Rosenbaum and Saeed-Vafa, Kiarostami says:

Things seem to be losing those specific characteristics they used to have that separate one area or nation from another. The only exception to that rule, luckily, is human nature. Certain rules govern the growth of trees; they need light, water, dirt, and air. By the same token, there are things that all people need. It’s our good fortune that all the superficial things have become so superficial that only human nature provides us with a refuge that has any depth to it. [29]

The rigidity of ideas and obliviousness that define the psychological space of human beings in these films stem from a particular view of nature, one that, as Bachelard, citing Marie Bonaparte, a French author and psychoanalyst, writes, “For each of us, nature is only a prolonging of our own primitive narcissism which, in the beginning, annexed the nurturing, protecting mother.” [30] Yet in Kiarostami’s films, this narcissistic space transforms through struggle with nature. Their self-absorbed vision yields to an ethical one as nature – forcing difficult paths and revealing its destructive power – compels characters to reconsider their plans. Throughout And Life Goes On, the father perceives the landscape in a deeply subjective, almost solipsistic way. He remains a detached observer amid disaster, and towards the end of the film hesitates to help an injured man carrying a gas canister. However, as Stephen Bransford observes, this changes in the final scene when the father struggles to climb the hill and must rely on help from others. At this moment, the landscape transforms from a mere nostalgic idealisation of the past into a dynamic, social space – one that demands interaction and ethical engagement. [31] In the following section I examine the process of this transformation.

 

Liquification, Labyrinths, and the Roundness of Being

In his seminal film Close-Up (1990), Abbas Kiarostami reconstructs the true story of Hossein Sabzian, a man who impersonates a famous Iranian filmmaker and engages with the family he deceives. Alain Bergala notes how Sabzian’s radical identity shift – from unknown worker to celebrated filmmaker – proves contagious, affecting everyone in the film, even Kiarostami, who consistently resisted letting his fiction or characters solidify into fixed forms. This collective dream of self-reinvention fascinates the director as it embodies a fundamental human freedom, as Bergala writes: “[…] the freedom not to be locked into a fixed identity. The liberation of one’s own self-image.” [32] I contend that this transformative freedom – whether as re-education, ethical engagement, or identity shift – is never given but earned through what I will term (following Bachelard) a process of “liquification.” [33] As Uhlin argues, drawing on Bachelard, water, fire, and air – unlike earth – spark imagination through their dynamism and fluidity. He writes: “The imagination of earth – the profusion of images it gives forth – arises from this ‘struggle against the solidity of matter’. Elemental earth requires a protracted and laborious engagement, and Kiarostami’s characters routinely contend with a lithic agency that refuses to be mastered.” [34] Building on this observation, I argue these films stylistically and narratively depict earth itself imagining water and fluidity. In a sense, Kiarostami’s films often stage transformation not as sudden change but as a slow, resistant process shaped by the material qualities of the landscape. This dynamic unfolds through material tensions between geological solidity and hydrological movement – between what is fixed, heavy, and dry, and what seeks to flow, soften, or dissolve.

Amidst the often dry and rocky landscapes of these films, there persists a latent desire for liquidity – sometimes directly referenced, sometimes existing off-screen, and at times conspicuously absent. In The Wind Will Carry Us, this manifests in the milk squeezed from a cow underground in darkness. In And Life Goes On, it appears through recurring motifs: the son and later the father urinating, the warm Coca-Cola the boy spills through the car’s window before sharing some with a woman on the bus next to their car in a traffic jam, the words the boy exchanges with a laundress about spring versus tap water, and the droplets that fall on Farhad’s head as Tahereh waters flowers. Through the Olive Trees hints at water only indirectly – women boarding a truck, returning from a bathhouse outside Koker. Taste of Cherry stands apart as the only film where water is wholly absent; the protagonist refuses tea several times when it is offered to him, as if surrendering entirely to, and absorbed by, the earth.

Beyond these explicit references, the serpentine trajectories of cars and characters across these landscapes evoke formal resemblances – most immediately to the movement of snakes, earthbound creatures navigating terrain akin to Kiarostami’s winding paths. Yet, narratively these routes operate in films less through formal resemblance than through what, in Bachelard’s terms, is material imagination – “one that gives life to the material cause [of imagination]” – in contrast to the formal imagination, defined as “one that gives life to the formal cause [of imagination]”. These trajectories articulate material imagination precisely through their destabilising function – resisting fixed identities or structures by physically enacting shifts in perspective, relationships, and even narrative ontology.  Bachelard draws a distinction between these two types of imagination, stating, “when forms, mere perishable forms and vain images—perpetual change of surfaces—are put aside, these images of matter are dreamt substantially and intimately. They have weight; they constitute a heart.” [35] In this sense, the twisting dirt roads in Kiarostami’s films function like the courses of rivers or springs – what Paul Claudel describes as “[…] the liquification of the earth’s substance; it is the eruption of liquid water rooted in its most secret folds, of milk under the sucking of the Ocean which is nursing.” [36] In these films, this liquification process unfolds in two key ways. First, figurative liquification: the cars’ struggle to traverse rocky paths mirrors water flowing through obstructions. Second, figural liquification: the repeated traversal of these routes reflects the mental and psychological liquification of protagonists – those gripped by rigid, obsessive ideas (the “imagination of earth”), transitioning them from a petrified, earth-like state (fixed ideation) to fluidity (the “imagination of water”).

This structural duality – between the geological and the hydrological – underscores Kiarostami’s preoccupation with transformation, where the process of transformation occurs in an interaction between resistance (stone/earth) and motion (water/flow), akin to Paul Claudel’s assertion that “everything the heart desires can always be reduced to a water figure.” [37] Evoking material imagination, Nancy connects this imagination of liquidity in Kiarostami’s films to the materiality of film itself – a medium that transitions from physical form to immaterial perception, writing “a ribbon (like the roads travelled), a gel, pane of glass and water, all at once, it is a sort of capturing fluid that grips the living and holds it in twenty-four discrete pictures each second, only to fluidify their sequence instantaneously in a continual look.” [38] In And Life Goes On, the earth persistently obstructs movement. Early in the film, just as Farhad’s car emerges from the tunnel, the elemental earth continually impedes progress through obstacles – rockfalls, road cracks, steep uphill paths, etc. Yet Farhad’s car moves like water, constantly finding ways to flow around these barriers. In Through the Olive Trees, Hossein repeatedly points to Tahereh’s heart of stone and her emotional hardness – a heart he stubbornly tries to penetrate, much like water seeping through cracks in rock. Thus, as previously noted, the figuration of the imagination of water takes shape precisely in opposition to such obstructions. Referring to the final shot of Through the Olive Trees, Uhlin writes: “If we read the final shot as signaling the union of the couple, then the marriage plot resolves the petric drama (the aversion to masonry, the heart of stone), and the narrative and formal blockages of the second and third film of the trilogy are finally released.” [39] In this sense, the elemental tension between earth and water not only structures the films’ visual and narrative rhythms but also becomes the very medium through which the possibility of emotional and cinematic movement – of resolution, release, and renewal – is imagined.

Returning to the protagonists’ rigid quests – their linear journeys towards presupposed goals – a contradiction emerges: the narratives force them into circular paths, superimposing destination on origin, the elsewhere onto the same. Figuratively speaking, the protagonists’ psychological space (their world of ideas) initially appears either smaller (in And Life Goes On, Taste of Cherry, Through the Olive Trees) or larger (The Wind Will Carry Us) than the narrative’s experiential space. Through repetition, this mental space undergoes liquification – expanding or being milled – until it fits within the narrative’s dimensions. Thus, these cyclical journeys mirror life and death’s coexistence – the dead inhabiting the same spaces as the living, as powerfully depicted in And Life Goes On where carpet washing occurs alongside corpse washing. The idea of repetition suggests a labyrinth in these films – the protagonists retrace the same paths without ever reaching their initial goal, as if lost. This labyrinth operates on two layers: the physical (roads and obstacles, the “hard labyrinth”) and the mental, which constitutes the “soft labyrinth”. The latter manifests through extended dialogues – asking directions, guiding conversations – or recalling memories from previous films in the trilogy, as well as the repetitive attempts to convince passengers to assist the protagonist’s suicide in Taste of Cherry. Kiarostami fuses both labyrinths, trapping protagonists in journeys where paths and guides promise direction yet only distort their original goals. As Aparício observes, in these films Kiarostami operates a subtle superimposing of outside and inside: “[C]ertainly, there are similarities between heterotopia and Kiarostami’s spaces. His landscapes are road maps, but villages are labyrinths and mirror places, portraits of someone’s soul.” [40] This is best portrayed in The Wind Will Carry Us in which the secretive manner and tricky methods of Behzad is set against a labyrinthine village and spiralling roads. Implying the process of liquification in this film, Bergala notes that “little by little, however, this man – who begins by asking questions before taking the time to look and understand – will allow himself to be disturbed by the enigmas of all kinds, including visual ones, that this village sets against his (bad) interpretive habits. He will gradually detoxify from his (focalizing) way of looking at and listening to others.” [41] We might recall that this act of detoxification – as Bergala puts it – is visually enacted towards the end of the film, when Behzad throws a bucket of water onto his car’s windshield and casts the thighbone into a stream – both gestures finding their proper figural place within this context of liquification.

Furthermore, by superimposing two spaces onto each other, the dialectics of inside and outside in Kiarostami’s films assumes an ontological meaning as there is a constant circular – eventually spiralling movement – between these two spaces of being, a winding path of recurrences. As Bachelard vividly captures it: “Entrapped in being, we shall always have to come out of it. And when we are hardly outside of being, we always have to go back into it. Thus, in being, everything is circuitous, roundabout, recurrent, so much talk; a chaplet of sojournings, a refrain with endless verses. But what a spiral man’s being represents! And what a number of invertible dynamisms there are in this spiral! One no longer knows right away whether one is running toward the center or escaping.” [42] [author’s emphasis] The roundness implied here finds proper figural imagery in Kiarostami’s films. Beyond his stylistic use of fundamental elements, there is a certain recurring image in his films that is as thematically and poetically important as the serpentine roads. This image is the solitary tree that, besides its symbolic value as a sign of durability and solitude, not only differentiates the landscape and marks hills’ summit and the end of the serpentine road (as in the Koker trilogy) but also identifies key spatial markers: the grave’s location in Taste of Cherry, and the village’s location in The Wind Will Carry Us. Furthermore, in terms of material imagination, a solitary tree is a form of being that attributes a certain form of roundness to the landscapes by marking both the starting and the ending point of the recurring journeys in the films. “A poet”, as Bachelard writes, “knows that when a thing becomes isolated, it becomes round, assumes a figure of being that is concentrated upon itself. In Rilke’s Poèmes français this is how the walnut tree lives and commands attention. Here, again around a lone tree, which is the center of a world, the dome of the sky becomes round, in accordance with the rule of cosmic poetry.” [43] The solitary tree’s enduring presence (a vertical being) in these films materially enacts what the recursive horizontal journeys perform narratively – both redefining the space and limits of being in terms of cosmic centre and periphery.

In closing, it may be said that what emerges from Kiarostami’s recurrent dispositif – the serpentine paths, elemental motifs, and solitary trees – is a staging of material imagination that unfolds through spatial dialectics: inside and outside, enclosure and expanse, the car interior and the open landscape. His cinema negotiates the tension between the very small and the very large – mirrored in long shots of vast terrain and close shots of confined interiors – rendering transformation not as resolution but as a slow, circuitous interplay between solidity and fluidity, difference and repetition, earth and water, self and world.

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Notes

[1] Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 19.

[2] Manny Farber, Negative Space (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 3.

[3] See Pedram Dibazar, “Wandering Cars and Extended Presence: Abbas Kiarostami’s Embodied Cinema of Everyday Mobility,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 15, no. 3 (2017): 305, Accessed July 7^th, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1308156.

[4] Abbas Kiarostami, “Le goat du cache” [interview], Cahiers du Cinéma no. 518 (1997): 68, my translation.

[5] Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6, cited in Stephen Bransford, “The Rural Space of Abbas Kiarostami,” Senses of Cinema no. 29 (December 2003), Accessed May 6^th, 2025, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/abbas-kiarostami/kiarostami_rural_space_and_place/.

[6] Maria Irene Aparício, “On Locations: Kiarostami’s Landscapes and Cinematic Value,” in New Approaches to Cinematic Space (London: Routledge, 2018), 156.

[7] Ibid., 160.

[8] See Negar Mottahedeh, Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 99.

[9] Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel,” in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 68–69.

[10] Ibid., 70.

[11] See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Evidence of Film, trans. Christine Irizarry and Verena Andermatt Conley (Brussels: Yves Gevaert Publisher, 2001), 14.

[12] Ibid., 16.

[13] Alain Bergala, “L’os et le pare-brise”, Cahiers du cinéma no. 541 (1999): 34, my translation.

[14] Ibid., 34.

[15] Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983), 10.

[16] Ibid., 10.

[17] Abbas Kiarostami, quoted in Hamid Naficy, A Social History of Iranian Cinema, vol. 4 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 89.

[18] See Joan Copjec, “The Imaginal World and Modern Oblivion: Kiarostami’s Zig-Zag,” Filozofski vestnik 37, no. 2 (2016): 21, Accessed May 7^th, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15840.003.0006.

[19] Ibid., 22.

[20] Ibid., 38.

[21] See A. J. Close, “Commonplace Theories of Art and Nature in Classical Antiquity and in the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30, no. 4 (1969): 469, Accessed May 12^th, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2708606.

[22] Camilla Flodin, “Adorno and Schelling on the Art–Nature Relation,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2018): 181, Accessed May 16^th, 2025, DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2017.1349648.

[23] Graig Uhlin, “Abbas Kiarostami, Global Art Cinema and the Material Imagination of Earth,” Studies in World Cinema 3 (2023): 26, Accessed May 2^nd, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/26659891-bja10027.

[24] Ibid., 27.

[25] Abbas Kiarostami, “Le goût du caché: Entretien avec Abbas Kiarostami,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 518 (1997): 67, my translation.

[26] Saeed-Vafa and Rosenbaum, Abbas Kiarostami, 59-60.

[27] Uhlin, “Abbas Kiarostami,” 25.

[28] François Truffaut, The Films in My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 47.

[29] Abbas Kiarostami, interview by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, in Abbas Kiarostami (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 115.

[30] Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 62.

[31] See Bransford, “Days in the Country”.

[32] Alain Bergala, “Kiarostami et le kaïros,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 725 (2016): 83.

[33] See Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 123.

[34] Uhlin, “Abbas Kiarostami,” 28.

[35] Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 1.

[36] Paul Claudel, Connaissance de l’Est (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945), 251, quoted in Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 123.

[37] Paul Claudel, Positions et propositions, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1928-1934), 235, quoted in Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams, 148.

[38] Nancy, L’Évidence du film, 50.

[39] Uhlin, “Abbas Kiarostami,” 31.

[40] Aparício, “On Locations,” 162.

[41] Bergala, “L’os et le pare-brise,” 35, my translation.

[42] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 214.

[43] Ibid., 239.

---

Bibliography

Aparício, Maria Irene. “On Locations: Kiarostami’s Landscapes and Cinematic Value.” In New Approaches to Cinematic Space, edited by Filipa Rosário and Iván Villarmea Álvarez, 155-165. London: Routledge, 2018.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Translated by Edith R. Farrell. Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983.

Bergala, Alain. “Kiarostami et le kaïros.” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 725 (September 2016): 83-84.

Bergala, Alain. “L’os et le pare-brise”. Cahiers du cinéma no. 541 (1999).

Bransford, Stephen. “The Rural Space of Abbas Kiarostami.” Senses of Cinema no. 29 (December 2003). Accessed May 6^th, 2025, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/abbas-kiarostami/kiarostami_rural_space_and_place/.

Close, A. J. “Commonplace Theories of Art and Nature in Classical Antiquity and in the Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Ideas 30, no. 4 (1969): 467–86, Accessed May 12^th, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2708606.

Copjec, Joan. “The Imaginal World and Modern Oblivion: Kiarostami’s Zig-Zag.” Filozofski vestnik 37, no. 2 (2016): 21–58, Accessed May 7^th, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15840.003.0006.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel.” In Negotiations, translated by Martin Joughin, 68-79. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Dibazar, Pedram. “Wandering Cars and Extended Presence: Abbas Kiarostami’s Embodied Cinema of Everyday Mobility.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 15, no. 3 (2017) 299–326, Accessed July 7^th, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2017.1308156.

Farber, Manny. Negative Space. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971.

Flodin, Camilla. “Adorno and Schelling on the Art–Nature Relation.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2018): 176–96, Accessed May 16^th, 2025, DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2017.1349648.

Kiarostami, Abbas. “Le goat du cache.” Cahiers du Cinéma no. 518 (1997), 66-69.

Mottahedeh, Negar. Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Naficy, Hamid. A Social History of Iranian Cinema. Vol. 4, The Globalizing Era, 1984–2010. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Evidence of Film. Translated by Christine Irizarry and Verena Andermatt Conley. Brussels: Yves Gevaert Publisher, 2001.

Saeed-Vafa, Mehrnaz, and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Abbas Kiarostami. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Truffaut, François. The Films in My Life. Translated by Leonard Mayhew. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.

Uhlin, Graig. “Abbas Kiarostami, Global Art Cinema and the Material Imagination of Earth.” Studies in World Cinema 3 (2023): 19-38, Accessed May 2^nd, 2025, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/26659891-bja10027.

Filmography

Recess (Zang-e Tafrih). Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Iran: 1972.

Where Is the Friend’s House? (Khane-ye doust kodjast?). Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Iran: 1987.

Close-Up (Nema-ye nazdik). Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Iran: 1990.

And Life Goes On (Zendegi va digar hich). Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Iran: 1992.

Through the Olive Trees (Zire darakhatan zeyton). Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Iran: 1994.

Taste of Cherry (Ta’m e guilass). Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Iran: 1997.

The Wind Will Carry Us (Bad ma ra khahad bord). Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Iran: 1999.

Biography

Alborz Mahboobkhah is a PhD student at Freie Universität Berlin, researching French post-Nouvelle Vague cinema with a focus on Philippe Garrel under the supervision of Prof. Matthias Grotkopp. His thesis examines the autobiographical turn in French cinema following the May ‘68 events, analysing the melancholic, temporal, and figural effects and dimensions of autobiographical filmmaking in the works of Jean Eustache, Maurice Pialat, Guy Gilles, Chantal Akerman, and others. He is a co-founder, writer, and editor of Vitascope, the Farsi-language online journal dedicated to cinema. He has translated and published Serge Daney’s book Persévérance from French to Farsi. His work has also appeared in Sabzian and Senses of Cinema, where he has written about repetition in the films of Ozu and temporal mise-en-abyme in the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v22.i0.2974

In the 1970s, the South Wales valleys began a long process of deindustrialisation. The service industries and mass unemployment began to dominate the working patterns of life from Neath in the West to Cwmbran in the East. [1] Cinema Action’s (CA) documentary So That You Can Live is set in these valleys and traces the experience of the working-class Butts family from 1976 into the early 1980s. [2] The film narrativises the shifting conditions of work and life in this period, following various members of the family in and out of work as they migrate across the valleys or escape to England. While the historiography and cultural study of the broader crises of British deindustrialisation, decline in Britain’s international economic standing, ‘80s authoritarianism of the British state, and global accumulation downturn are, by now, familiar, there is a relative paucity of work that considers these crises in the cultural and economic specificity of the Welsh context. [3] So That You Can Live offers, I argue, an excellent case to elucidate the aesthetic registration of these crises in Wales. 

Crisis principally emerges here as what Raymond Williams terms a structure of feeling. That is, I analyse crisis as an emerging, collective sense of breakdown of the nation and class that is actively formed and forming in response to shifting historical conditions. Unlike any definitive analytic exposition of crisis, structures of feeling “do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalisation before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action”. [4] ‘Structure of feeling’ captures the presentness of attempts to articulate a still murky historical moment — it is a striving towards, but not quite achieving, a final, complete analytic perspective. As Williams reminds us, it is emergent artistic formations, such as the independent film movement to which CA belonged, that frequently register and engender novel structures of feeling, often arising as a “modification or disturbance” of older artistic forms. [5] For Williams, the notion of structure of feeling “can be specifically related to the evidence of forms … which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming”. [6] Paying close attention to the aesthetic constitution of this structure of feeling, in particular the modification or disturbance of Welsh landscape conventions, I aim not to reduce this registration to the general social content of crisis but rather to attend to the articulation of crisis within the formal specificity of So That You Can Live’s aesthetic transformations. 

Unlike CA’s previous work, a slate of agit-prop campaign films made for the trade union movement, which often featured rallying speeches and explosive images of specific struggles, the majority of So That You Can Live consists of observational documentary footage that offers an account, at the personal and familial level, of the very difficulties of working-class struggle in the late 1970s. The film’s narrative trajectory can be glimpsed at two picket lines that appear at the start and the end of the film. The contrasts between the pickets provide microcosms of the shifting dynamics of working-class life in the valleys. The first, in 1976, features Shirley — the mother of the Butts family, a keen shop-steward and the film’s key protagonist — speaking about the imminent victory in the factory women’s fight for equal wages with their male counterparts. The second, in 1981, shows us Shirley, after she has lost her job and union position, out in support of a strike. Discussion between picketers now revolves around key terms like unemployment, factory closures, and “dead valleys”. Shirley suggests here that the opportunity to fight was missed. 

Across the film, a plot slowly develops in various extended observational sequences: discussions with Shirley in her home or on the bus, the birth of a grandchild, the family farming a newly acquired small holding, or children entering the workforce. Despite a non-linear temporal arrangement across the film, a basic narrative trajectory is held together by such key chronological markers. However, it is through the introduction of various moments of generic divergence from the observational documentary form — what Williams calls a “modification or disturbance” — that the film struggles to articulate not just concrete shifts in the valleys but the very conditions of their historical possibility: the shifting forms of production in Wales, the determining relationships between the ‘centre’ of Britain and its internal peripheries, [7] the crisis of deindustrialisation and unemployment and the production of history and popular memory in the region.

Such generic divergence, an in-between mode that refutes both pure modernist self-reflexivity and simple realist immediacy, can be glimpsed in the film’s creative inversion of political documentary voice tropes. CA combined the ‘authentic’ voice of the documentary subject with the authoritative, intellectual voice-over by having Shirley’s daughter, Diane, read and interpret passages of Raymond Williams’ The Country and The City. Equally, divergence is offered in the non-linear narrative structuring, with the political documentary’s traditionally climactic picket line appearing instead at the beginning of the film. However, in this article, I will consider this working within and against generic and symbolic tropes across one local instance of the film’s textual system: its use of landscape imagery. Tracing the film’s activation of the symbolic terrain of the southern Welsh landscape, I consider how the breakdown of traditional Welsh landscape tropes within the film articulates a structure of feeling of crisis — a crisis of both the Welsh industrial working-class and the unevenly distributed breakdown of the British economy and state in the 1970s. The film’s shifting landscapes are the vehicle through which to capture this structure as a “cultural hypothesis” or “social experiences in solution”. [8] That is, its landscapes are the symbolic material for variable, incomplete attempts to define and comprehend “a social experience which is still in process”. [9] I argue that treating the landscape as a contradictory, unstable cypher for a range of emergent ideological attachments enables us to uncover how landscape imagery has historically mediated the relationships between nationhood, class, and changes in Welsh society’s mode of production. To begin, I briefly sketch an economic history of Wales and the valleys, before tracing a genealogy of Welsh landscape imagery, in order to analyse the material and symbolic forces that underscore So That You Can Live’s unstable landscapes.

 

Midway Wales and the Long Decline 

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Wales was a mostly agrarian community with little indigenous aristocracy or bourgeoisie. Tom Nairn suggests that with the onset of modern industry, Wales took up a peculiar place in European economic history. [10] Wales began to share many features of European regions undergoing relative, forced under-development, such as “depopulation, cultural oppression, fragmentary and distorted development” with much of the nation maintaining an impoverished agrarian basis as in Corsica, Britanny, or Galicia. [11] The country simultaneously shared the features of a relatively over-developed small nation, as it was a centre of the Industrial Revolution. This over-/under-developed split made Wales an “ambiguous, midway location”. [12] Unlike economic development imposed upon small provinces, Welsh modernisation hugely altered the conditions of life for most of the population, with the valleys becoming a global industrial centre in the 19th century. Nonetheless, this industrialisation, like economic development directed at peripheral regions, was almost entirely directed from outside and concentrated within the coal and steel industries. Wales did not have a native bourgeoisie (like in Scotland or the Basque Country) but instead gained an English bourgeoisie. Moreover, the nation lacked a recent history of statehood with latent political institutions capable of reactivation by later nationalist movements, as in Scotland and Catalonia. In Nairn’s words, this was an “at once enormous and decentred industrialisation”. [13]

As such, Wales became “an integral but peripheral part of a general United Kingdom economy” developing unevenly in relation to England, whose capital organised the Welsh economy. [14] This uneven dependency continued across the 20th century, with external manufacturing mainly “exerted from the rest of Britain, mainly in the South East and West Midlands” or overseas. [15] In particular, the valleys represented a large, low-cost labour market with widespread unemployment forcing workers to accept “occupationally homogenous and low skill employment”. [16] With the decline of the coal and steel industries, a situation of dependency deepened. That is, while clearly benefiting and greatly contributing to the violent rise of the British empire, Wales developed “an established and continuing role which is thrust upon the inhabitants of some regions to accept lower living standards to produce the conditions for the realization of profits in other regions or countries”. [17] As we shall see, So That You Can Live repeatedly grapples with this uneven dependency. Across the image track, the London cityscape is the recurrent counterpart to the valleys’ landscapes, and incessant verbal references to ‘outside forces’ that shape the lives of its protagonists pepper the soundtrack. 

These “usual forces of uneven development” that were “tied together unusually closely and graphically” greatly shaped the familiar oppositions of Welsh cultural and political life. [18] Indeed, Welsh nationalist politics in the 19th century, which burgeoned within cultural movements like Eisteddfod renewal and the University Colleges, developed out of a desire to defend a rural, traditional identity grounded in the Welsh language and in reaction against the Anglicised, industrialised South. Against this nationalism, another Welsh political identity was tied to industry and a broader socialist and trade union struggle itself, premised upon participation in a broader British Labour movement. [19] Neither formation, it should be noted, was necessarily oppositional to British imperialism, which served as the often unspoken foundation for their very existence. Moreover, as Nairn points out, the Welsh nationalist movement both reacted to and was based upon the capitalist South, where movement to industrial centres salvaged the Welsh language from consignation to the ‘backward’ countryside. [20] Hence, in the valleys, traditionalism and defence of the rural lived alongside the modernisations of industry and an attendant proletarian identity. This close tying together of different modes of life and temporalities is evident in So That You Can Live, where scenes of industrial action exist alongside those of the Butts’ family farming small holdings. Indeed, it is in the very landscape of the valleys, where collieries and farmland mark the hills, that the unevenness of Welsh development is so visibly apparent and spatially close. 

The other major historical trajectory that So That You Can Live engages with is one of the valley’s industrial decline and unemployment that can be traced across the post-war era. In the immediate post-war period, nationalised industries like the Coal Board and Steel Corporation employed an irregular number of workers in Wales compared to British averages. By the 1960s, with the continuation of pre-war coal and steel decline, Wales was opened to Foreign Direct Investment, and foreign multinationals from America, Europe, and Japan opened branches in South Wales. [21] An overreliance on coal was replaced by an overreliance on multinational plants. These branches moved elsewhere in Europe when economic circumstances made it favourable to do so. [22] As such, between 1968 and 1983, there was a total collapse of the old basic industries like mining and steel, and by the end of 1982, employment in Wales was the lowest in decades. [23] While other regions of Britain were similarly undergoing deindustrialisation and crises of unemployment in the 1970s, Welsh wages decreased relative to the rest of Britain. [24] The consequences of reliance on branch and multinational plants “became apparent in the early 1980s when recession proved disastrous, and [South Wales] lost more manufacturing jobs relative to its population than any other area in Britain”. [25] Such catastrophic deindustrialisation drives the narrative developed in So That You Can Live, with the film following Shirley’s attempts to find work and locate alternative means of subsistence and registers in the closed collieries that speckle its landscapes. In what follows, I consider how this history of uneven development, dependency, and deindustrialisation has shaped historic representations of the valleys’ landscapes and how the resultant symbolic terrain is activated in So That You Can Live. 

 

Landscape and the Valleys

So That You Can Live was a hugely significant film in the British independent film movement. [26] The film was praised for its inversion of tropes of a working-class documentary subject familiar from the visual history of the valleys and CA’s previous agit-prop films. [27] However, responses to So That You Can Live’s landscapes have varied. In Paul Willemen’s reading, the film’s landscapes are deployed as a “site where the dynamics of history can be read”. [28] More recently, contemporary critic Colin Perry positively frames the film as part of a counter-pastoral cinematic tradition on account of its usage of The Country and The City. [29] Yet Sue Aspinall and Mandy Merck denounced its use of landscapes that “produce a sense of melancholy and loss, creating an elegiac mood reminiscent of the Augustan idealisation of the obscure countryman dwelling in rural simplicity”. [30]

These conflicting accounts capture the multiple potential pulls of working with pastoral imagery. The landscape here holds such symbolic force as to produce directly antagonistic readings. Where some spectators find the critical force of its landscapes points to the historical development of capitalist modernity, others find it a simple idealisation of the pastoral. W. J. T. Mitchell’s analysis of landscape as a medium elucidates the conditions of possibility for such antinomic readings; he claims that the landscape is not a raw material but “always already a symbolic form in its own right”, and that all landscape imagery is “a representation of something that is already a representation in its own right”. [31] The film pulls its readers in conflicting directions precisely because the Welsh landscape is a symbolic form in itself, with an ideological weight and pre-history that escapes the film’s own usage, separate and yet emerging from any individual representation of it. So That You Can Live’s deployment of landscape imagery is always already in excess of the film’s wider textual system. Thus, to understand the possibility of such conflicting readings, we must first unpick the various landscape representations that CA works within and against. I argue that the following, necessarily brief, selection of images indicates some of the long tropes that So That You Can Live engages. 

In Ron Lawrence’s 1984 painting of Pontrypridd, housed in the National Library of Wales, concentric circles of terraced houses, trees, and hills enclose a rugby match at the center (Figure 1). Lawrence’s painting indexes a dominant image of the valleys as a hermetic enclosed community, organically entwined with the landscape, around a transparent symbol of the national ‘soul’. In Bruce Davidson’s 1960s photography of the valleys, which, in his own words, attempted to capture the “lyrical beauty” of the community, this organicity takes the shape of harsh contrasts of industry and land. [32] The soil often appears scarred by mineshafts and smoke. The people appear torn from their natural connection with the land, as suggested in miners’ darkened faces contrasted against the faded greens and counterposed horizontal and vertical lines (Figure 2).

Perhaps the most famous film about Wales, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941), similarly counterposes industry and nature as opposing forces. For example, in its opening sequence, a cross-fade takes us from the colliery and the domineering spoil tip, an image of the ‘present’ we learn from the voice-over narration and negatively imbued with its minor-scale orchestral accompaniment, to the luscious green rolling hills. The pastoral past is thrust upon us by the film’s central nostalgic string motif and gleaming choral doubling. Elsewhere, the forces of industry and nature are counterposed directly, as in a frame where the child is separated on either side by smoke and nature, signified by a tree, in a diagonal horizon that marks their asymmetry between, but not the total dominance of, the unnatural over the community (Figure 3). “For the colliery”, our narrator tells us, “had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.” Nature here is the community, its organic innocence, and industry is the disruption of some outside evil. 

How Green Was My Valley was a literary adaptation from Richard Llewellyn’s novel of the same name. [33] So too in the Welsh industrial novel, we find literary renditions of this fundamental opposition. For Raymond Williams, these traditional contrasts of “darkness and light, of being trapped and of getting clear”, the oppositions between the darkness of the pits and the clarity of the open landscape, finds particular purchase on the very ground of the valleys precisely because “the pastoral life, which had been Welsh history, is still another Welsh present, and in its visible presence – not as an ideal contrast but as the slope, the skyline, to be seen immediately from the streets and from the pit-tops”. [34] Such contrasts then render a consciousness of both history, alternative modes of production, and Welsh over-/under-development. Yet, this consciousness of historical possibilities is filtered through a distinctly backward-looking, nostalgic melancholy (in the properly Freudian sense of a blockage to the conscious, egotistic working through of loss). The principal object of this melancholic mode is an impossible and imaginary pastoral past (a “lyrical beauty”) abstracted from economic relations of domination within agricultural production, as an aesthetic means of escape from industrial capitalism’s own relations of domination. 

Other mid-20th-century Welsh cultural production similarly reflects on the 19th-century emergence of industrial manufacturing via the changes in the landscape. Gwyn Thomas’ All Things Betray Thee (1949) renders the landscape as a medium through which a proto-class consciousness emerges principally in locating the shared dominance of the industrialists over all the towns in the valleys: 

“You see no occasional smoky patches behind each line of hills? […] Under each smudge. There is a town like Moonlea. A centre of new work, in mine, mill or foundry […] Strings of towns, just like Moonlea, separated as yet by short hills, long ignorance and a little fear. If those townships were once to act together, we’d be more than a bubble in the mud. […] And in each Moonlea, a few thousand people whose pattern of feeling and experience, whose impulse of misery, are precisely as ours.” [35]

In Coal Face (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1935), a Griersonian documentary looking at coal mining across Britain, the valleys appear no longer as hermetic but as part of the unity of Britain, for whom mining is the “basic industry”. Rhythmic montages connect images of collieries jutting out of the land across different regions, collapsing the latter into an organic unity within which each individual region labours for the greater national good. The film culminates in a sequence that cuts across different industries, as the narrator lists the yearly coal contributions needed in each, underscoring the necessary interconnectedness that marks the national image sought after. Here, the landscape becomes the industry-scape whose flattened continuity combines to create a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts image of the British nation leaping forward into modernity. 

Every Valley (Michael Clarke, 1957), a British Transport Film production, repeats these unifying connections at the lower scale of the Welsh nation. The film opens with a landscape pan while the voice-over invokes past modes of production: “the sun rose … on the ruins of Victorian ironworks, on the castellated towers of Edwardian landlords, on the terraced roofs of the miners”. After this invocation, landscape images enter as bridging shots, the mere site of developing modern transport links between each unnamed industrial town. Such links supersede the landscape as a site of historical curiosity, becoming “new lifelines of a changing life” and thrusting the valleys into a unified future by enabling the diversification of industry away from mining. Every Valley reduces the landscape to the harmonious image of the undifferentiated Welsh community’s leap into the future. 

From this brief survey, we can delineate two tropes operative across Welsh landscape imagery. On the one hand, we have the organicity of the hermetic community, the innocent and lyrical valleys as ruptured by the outside of industry. On the other hand, we have the non-hermetic image of the valleys as one natural cell in the essential unity of all industrial Great Britain or Wales. These two tropes index a typical split of 20th-century Welsh political identity. The former aligns with the nationalist politics of tradition and pastoralism, which wishes to overturn the entwined anglicisation and modernisation in the valleys — an identification with the rural still visible in the landscape and operative in the Welsh economy. The latter aligns with a productivist, industrial class identity committed to participation in the Labour Party and union movement. So That You Can Live works with these containers of meaning, and unexpectedly displaces their familiarity in an attempt to simultaneously register the historical development of modes of production within the valleys, relations of dependency with English capital, and the crises of Welsh working-class identity in the period. 

 

So That You Can Live‘s Unexpected Landscapes

So That You Can Live is a film about the valleys that begins, rather peculiarly, in London. Diane Butts has moved to London to look for a job “because there’s none down in Wales”. She has quickly discovered that she lacks the necessary educational level for employment. As she looks across the city, Diane speaks of an article she has read on the asymmetries in the Welsh and English education systems (Figure 4). The montage moves us, quite literally, with the interjecting image of a bus to the Rhymney valley. Atop a slow pan across the hills, an ex-miner sits on the valley slope and imagines if the “hills could speak” of the labour performed on them (Figure 5). The displacement of the typically Welsh filmic space, from the lyrical hills to an outside, registers here both as a unity and as a separation, a unity in separation; the montage entwines the Valleys and London together, unevenly. This unevenness is simultaneously rendered metonymically in the images’ differing topography, narratively in Diane’s search for work in London, and through the struggles of the documentary subject to articulate their uneven history, as in Diane’s reflections on educational disparity, or memory speculation, as in the speaking hills. 

The montage, a cut between the valleys and London, which is repeated throughout the film, constructs a direct spatial contradiction between the impoverished valleys and developed England, gesturing towards a history of external determination and inequality between regions. This visualised spatial juxtaposition recalls Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of the Nanterre student revolt. [36] For Lefebvre, the new Parisian university campus located in Nanterre between the metro and the Algerian ‘shanty towns’ forced middle-class students to traverse the segregated spaces of education and poverty and thus indicated the spatial and temporal unevenness of French urban development. As Kristin Ross puts it, Lefebvre’s example shows that “economic inequality … produced not only contrasting landscapes and lived environments but vastly different temporalities”. [37] Indeed, the contrast between Diane’s search for potential, future work in London and the ex-miner’s vision of re-animated dead labour in Rhymney suggests a closeness to past rural life inaccessible within London’s modernised terrain. 

In this opening montage, we can glimpse a dual activation-inversion of both landscape tropes. Firstly, there is an activation of the hermetic, nostalgic image of organic community in the slow panning of the green hills. Yet this is an attempt to locate a different valence of the trope’s pull towards an alternative, past mode of production, instead articulated here as a practice of reading the landscape as a depository of history and dead labour that shapes contemporary life. The insistence on the process of reading here is doubled by over-shoulder compositions highlighting the act of looking and interpreting. Secondly, in the montage of London and Rhymney, there is an activation of the trope of the valleys as but one cell in the British system. However, by unevenly counterposing the valleys with their outside, the film relates the former as a dependent region, rather than one equal part of the whole. 

So That You Can Live contains a preponderance of landscape imagery structured upon a nature/industry dichotomy. Such sequencing works within this framework of historical-aesthetic understanding only to invert it in unexpected ways. Halfway through the film, Diane reads aloud a passage of The Country and the City, which talks of the relations between country and city as a driving force of the capitalist mode of production. We then cut to a tracking shot that moves from behind a hill to reveal rows of terraced houses lined by slag heaps. The use of the Williams text complicates the imagistic opposition of hill and heap; the opposition is instead rendered at the level of a ‘mode of production’. The nature/industry couplet morphs from an opposition of industry to a pure, natural past emptied of its social relations to a transformation of the industrial within the landscape, a living process of economic relations and reproduction marked into the land. Hence, over the tracking shot, a man’s memories of his childhood farm, which his “farmer-cum-miner” father ran, underline this necessity to read the landscape for such transformations. [38] The camera comes to a still, and we suddenly cut to a pan across London, as Diane again reads of “rent and interest, of situation and power, a wider system”, and back once more to farmland. This montage invites us to attempt, like Diane’s coming-to-consciousness, a reading of the landscape within the uneven relationships between regions; the sequence insists that the valleys, their history, and their people cannot be explained without the domination of British capital and its transformations.   

Elsewhere, we cut from a shot of Marx’s Capital, taken from a miners’ institute library, to another panning shot of the slag heaps and hills, to a job centre and listings for ‘urgently required steelworkers’ in West Germany and the Netherlands. Again, the abstraction of reading, rendered literally in the image of Marx’s book, and the displacement of filmic space, now to the outside of Western Europe, re-articulates the landscape as a cypher and overdetermined site of complex global processes, no longer an image that can be easily read as the isolated signifier of nature, the pastoral, or the organic. This also then repositions the film’s narrative and representational content of unemployment within the Butts family and the valleys more generally. This structure of feeling of crisis, of the instability of previous modes of work and life, and decay of isolated communities — with the Butts family shifting in and out of work and farming small holdings to get by — must be related, these montage sequences suggest, within the global decline of British capitalism and the relocation of industrial production to Western Europe. 

As Diane puts it, or Raymond Williams through her, speaking yet again over a tracking shot of the townscape: “It is so close this life in the family, in the valley, this effort and struggle at work, it is so close we don’t need to be told about it, until forces coming from right outside are putting such pressures on us that we are forced to ask what our lives really are, what this place really is”. This passage, from closeness to outside pressures, mirrors the film’s movement from the pastoral landscape to the abstractions of political economy. The film offers the image of the valleys as hermetic community, as if to say to the spectator: “See! This familiar place, this close life in the family, these lyrical hills”, only to use this very familiarity to unexpectedly denaturalise this no-longer possible pastoralism, to pull the rug out from under its feet, into the abstraction of material processes outside the frame. This movement is what John David Rhodes and Elena Gorfinkel have termed a space-place dialectic: a shift from locality to abstraction, and back again, to read a concrete place as a local instance of the broader spatial processes of capitalist totality. To ask, ‘what this place really is’ is to treat locality as the “means through which [abstract and generalizing] thought is able to articulate and materialise.” [39]

The very dynamism of the film’s landscape shots directs our attention to the historical and ideological instability of the landscape itself. Within single shots, we witness a transition from what appears, at first, to be the image of a pastoral past to the site of capitalist modernity proper. The manual process of reading, of tracking one’s eyes across a page, is mirrored here in many tracking or panning camera movements across the valley. Such movements demand that we interpret the historical layers and transformation within the various forms of appearance the landscape might take: from agrarian community to industrial heartland, from an over- and under-developed location into the wasteland of both the rural and the modern. Furthermore, the move away from a hypostatised opposition of Nature and Industry to an image of settled simultaneity also suggests the waning dominance of the industrial within the valleys. By returning a sense of historicity to both the agricultural and the industrial, the film displaces the sharp antagonism between these two modes, as ahistorical notions of old and new, and instead locates their contingency. This dispersal of the antagonism, from Davidson’s opposing lines in the image or Ford’s cuts between two images to the flattening movement of CA’s camera, registers the deindustrialisation of the valleys. The heaps, just like the farmland hills before them, become here another symbol of an accumulated past within the landscape. If there is a political force to this dispersal, it is found in the film’s giving shape to or recognition of the historical problem of a Welsh working-class that can no longer rely on older models of aesthetic imaginary with which to identify and position themselves. So That You Can Live inaugurates a still-deindustrialising image of Wales qua landscape, emptied of the battle between the hermetic community and the industrial invader. 

More broadly, this dissolution signals the crisis and collapse of an industrial proletariat proper, who in documentary imagery were often associated with the mining towns of the South Wales valleys, and an end to industrial manufacturing in the period. We might find similar formal registers of this collapse in the undecidability of documentary voice models in the film: neither the authoritative intellectual voice-over nor the authentic voice of the worker, but a combination of both in Diane’s reading of Raymond Williams. This mingling indicates a mismatch between available forms of political documentary and a shifted social reality. The assumed power of a self-conscious and coherent working-class subject grounded in received forms of struggle, offered in earlier CA agit-prop films like Fighting the Bill (1970) and UCS1 (1971), does not find purchase on the precarious life of the Butts family, especially in the new generation, signalled by Diane, which is further detached from oppositional proletarian pedagogy. Equally, the pre-formed, detached vocal explanation found in 1930s realist documentaries is absent precisely because such an analysis was incomplete when paired with the emergent details of the Butts’ life. The symbolic efficiency contained in the older proletarian documentary subject is limited in the face of a collapse of the proletarian ways of life on which such a subject was based. As Raymond Williams discussed in his interview on the film, the strike traditionally formed the narrative climax of left documentaries on the working class. [40] Yet the strike in So That You Can Live is the point of departure. This narrative trajectory further allegorises this shift in documentary mode, a turning away from the narrative inevitability of working-class organisation towards the very “difficulty of a collective project”. [41] Similarly, instead of relying on older models of working-class or nationalist opposition to the stain of “skinny black fingers” on the landscape, So That You Can Live’s historicised landscapes offer a “much sadder recognition of what the real shape of the problem is”. [42]

 

Unstable Landscapes Contra Nationalist Resolutions

In working within and against dominant landscape codes, So That You Can Live, at times, gives into the pulls of such tropes without which it is not intelligible. If filmic moments offer certain trajectories of meaning, they do so in friction with both actual spectators and historical codes of interpretation. [43] Indeed, the conflicting interpretations of So That You Can Live’s landscapes point to the inability of cinematic devices to fix images’ meanings, especially within the abundant, preformed symbolic terrain of the Welsh landscape. The film’s pastoral imagery, the invocation of the ‘closeness’ of life in the valleys, and the elegiac soundtrack, with its solo piano melody repeating incessantly throughout, might pull towards the lyrical image of a community ‘fallen’ from its organicity. As suggested above, Aspinall and Merck’s detraction of the film’s “Augustan idealization” can be understood as an identification of one of the film’s possible pulls into the symbolic force of the Welsh landscape as medium. [44]

Yet perhaps this very instability, So That You Can Live’s landscape’s potential to simultaneously recall, veer into, or subvert the history of Welsh landscape imagery constitutes its very political effectivity. The landscape’s capacity to lay bare the breadth of ideological investments in the Welsh national image par excellence enables the film to affectively render changes in the working patterns of the valleys. The pastoral pull remains in the film’s landscapes precisely because the pastoral remained, as it did for the Butts, a residual mode of life in the late 1970s with the collapse of industry and the absence of alternative means of reproduction. The film’s landscapes enable us to recognise the continued force of this idealised pull just as they insist upon its still-forming outmodedness.

Where the film avoids the landscape’s unstable imagery, it is at its most politically shortsighted. For example, the film’s closing sequences work as limiting devices. In the penultimate scene, Diane reads an invocation for the Welsh: “We have to look till we find ourselves again, find our country again, and change it for ourselves.” This nationalistic framing, tinted here with a progressive-socialist bent, encloses the film’s trajectories within a domineering Welshness, one that might undermine the cultural hypothesis of dislocation offered elsewhere. The idealistic gesture of the unproblematised, unified pronoun ‘ourselves’, a populist notion of Welshness contra the British and multi-national corporate outside, necessarily precludes an encounter with the darker history of Welsh embroilment in colonialism and imperialism. The unevenness between Wales and London, the stand-in for British capital, then becomes a formal flattening to a singular antinomy between inside and outside, itself a quasi-Marxist redoubling of the opposition between Industry/Nature as one of Capital/Welshness. Indeed, this sequence takes flight from the landscape to another inside, the Butts’ family home. Diane reads the nationalist passage atop a slow tracking shot that moves from family photographs to household detritus before landing on Diane herself. Here, away from the unstable and contradictory landscape, the house and the family can act as a simple metonym for the nation, with the shot’s closing image of youth invoking the Welsh future Diane speaks of.

In this penultimate sequence, the wider contradictions of Welsh life and history, its existence as a central part of a brutal international system of slavery and later imperialism, which in turn rendered it semi-peripheral and useless to the whims of global capital, are ultimately resolved by appeal to the imaginary resolution of the nation, or its rewriting as the progressive political form par excellence. We might venture that this national image is itself an overdetermined symptom of the waning effectivity of the workers’ movement to render itself the universal form. In Wales, the ‘break-up of Britain’, resurgent nationalist movements, total disillusionment with the British state as a vehicle for socialism, and the collapse of Labourism instead reigned supreme. Moreover, though the penultimate sequence appears to contain the film’s most direct political message, one that works to restrain what Welshness might mean, its populist optimism and finality are undercut elsewhere by the film’s landscapes. 

Just before the penultimate scene, a shot rests on another landscape. The camera pans from a hillside of forestry to a small farmhouse and a line of terraced houses. Diane tells us that investment firms have bought the forestry as protected deposits of capital. The panning motion elongates the vastness of forest land, suggesting the domineering presence of financial capital over the apparent idyll; the seemingly natural world, rather than the smog of industry, enters as another figure of British capital. An ex-mining farmer looks around at the hills, but the very land underneath his feet offers neither stability nor renewal. He discusses the closure of pits and the impossibility of farming for subsistence on his small-holding. We cut to another landscape where distant forestry curves behind a barn in the foreground (Figure 6), and, as the farmer walks through a gate with his sheep dog, he predicts upheaval in the future: “you’re bound to get violence, and you’re bound to get bitterness”. 

What initially appears as an image of a romantic, older way of life is not what it seems. Both Diane’s voice-over and the farmer’s speculation offer different codes with which to read the landscape. These voices insist that both the rural fantasy and industrial community are untenable in the face of outside private ownership of the surrounding land, the absence of a commons, and the flight of manufacturing capital from the region. Here, the slopes and the hills, a typical image of the Welsh nation, offer a simultaneously operative and false pastoral image that reveals the bind of a people stuck between the dying modes of the agrarian and the industrial, with no way out. This image is not the promise of a renewed people or country as in Diane’s subsequent nationalist invocation. Rather, the landscape’s impossible, tainted Augustean allure becomes the very medium through which the crisis of Wales — its entrapment in increasingly unsustainable, residual modes of production, its ownership from elsewhere, its long decline, its unemployment, and its deindustrialisation — can be glimpsed.  

 

Conclusion 

In this article, I have traced how the crisis of Welsh deindustrialisation registers, in So That You Can Live, as a formal breakdown of both political documentary and Welsh landscape tropes. As I have argued, landscape across Welsh visual art and literature is a central mediator of the national- and class-constituted structures of feeling across eras; in the South Wales valleys, the landscape has provided an open and visible symbolic terrain with which to affectively register and hypothesise the shifting, uneven character of production and daily working-life. The valleys and So That You Can Live offer a unique perspective in the British context. The valleys provide a visible coagulation of the agrarian and the industrial, an intensified compounding of the residual and becoming-residual of whole ways of life within a single terrain, that CA articulated within an uneven national and global frame by working within-and-against tropes of Welsh landscape imagery. 

Yet, CA’s deployment of landscape imagery echoes a wider turn towards the landscape in British and European left-filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s, suggesting the pertinence of my analysis beyond the Welsh context. As Colin Perry notes the landscape is a central image of many counter-pastoral, historical films and tele-plays in 1970s Britain — notably Penda’s Fen (Alan Clarke, 1974), Akenfield (Peter Hall, 1974), Winstanley (Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, 1975) and In the Forest (Phil Mulloy, 1978) — that both rejected and historicised the ascendent conservative nationalism of the mainstream British film industry. [45] Elsewhere, the landscape counters chauvinist Irish nationalism, as in the feminist Maeve (Pat Murphy, 1981), contains the traces and after-images of political struggle, as in Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Fortini/Cani (1976) or Too Early/Too Late (1981), or inscribes the waned historicity of an increasingly globalised economy, as in Michaelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). As various global and national crises compounded, this landscape-turn crystallised a collective sense that by looking outwards at the land, one might grasp the residual ways of life, latent struggles, and emerging historical processes greater than any individualised narrative that, in sum, overdetermined such crises. There was a sustained impulse to look again at the land, or to clear the (aesthetic) ground for new ways of looking at it, for traces of social transformations and histories whose effects would only later become clear.

As my reading of So That You Can Live points towards, to interpret such landscape imagery as the site of emergent structures of feeling might reveal a broader history of the ties between cinema, landscape, nationhood, and crises in the capitalist world-system. Such a landscape focus rebounds within and offers new direction to ongoing film-scholarly attention to cultures of deindustrialisation, [46] the (inter-)national in national cinemas, and the residual persistence of the agrarian within cinematic modernity. [47] So That You Can Live reminds us that it is in looking at the slopes and the hills that such historical, political, and conceptual problems might first come to consciousness.

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Notes

[1] Gwyn Alf Williams, When Was Wales? (London: Penguin 1985).

[2] For a brief history of CA, see: Oliver Dixon, “The chronotopes of radical film: Collective exhibition and the social practice of ‘Cinema Action’”, Moving Image Review and Art Journal, 14, no. 1 (2025).

[3] For example: Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso 2006); Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back (London: Routledge 1982); Stuart Hall, et al., Policing the Crisis (London: Macmillan Press LTD 1978); Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, 2^nd ed. (London: Verso 1981); Lester Freidman, ed., Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1993).

[4] Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 132.

[5] Ibid., 134.

[6] Ibid., 133.

[7] In a special journal issue on Peripheral Europes, Benjamin Kohlmann and Ivana Perica develop the notion of internal peripheries. That is, areas that, while not belonging to the global periphery proper, contain “decelerated development, economic stagnation or worse” relative to their wider unit – Europe in their case, Britain in ours. Kohlmann and Perica, “Introduction: Peripheral Europes,” Critical Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2023): 6.

[8] Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132-133.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain.

[11] Ibid., 208.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 209.

[14] John Williams, “The Rise and Decline of the Welsh Economy, 1890-1930”, in Class, Community and the Labour Movement: Wales and Canada, 1850-1930 ed. Deian R. Hopkin and Gregory S. Kealey (Cardiff: Llafur/CCLH, 1989), 17. This is not to suggest that Wales constituted an internal colony of England, rather that it was an internal periphery within a regionalised, not cultural, national or ethnic, division of labour.

[15] Philip Cooke, “Dependency, Supply Factors and Uneven Development in Wales and Other Problem Regions,” Regional Studies, 16, no. 3 (1982): 224.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., 225.

[18] Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, 2^nd ed. (London: Verso, 1981), 211.

[19] For a discussion of these oppositions, see Robin Mann and Steve Fenton, Nation, Class and Resentment: The Politics of National Identity in England, Scotland and Wales (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

[20] Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain, 210-11.

[21] Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?, (London: Penguin, 1985), 255.

[22] Leon Gooberman and Ben Curtis, “The age of factories: the rise and fall of manufacturing in South Wales, 1945–1985,” in New Perspectives on Welsh Industrial History, ed. Louise Miskell (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020).

[23] Gwyn Alf Williams, When Was Wales?, 255.

[24] Gavin Cameron, John Muellbauer, and Jonathon Snicker, “A Study in Structural Change: Relative Earnings in Wales Since the 1970s,” Regional Studies 36, no. 1 (2002).

[25] Gooberman and Curtis, The age of factories, 146.

[26] For a historical overview of the movement, see Margaret Dickinson, ed., Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90 (London: BFI, 1999).

[27] See, for example, Claire Johnston, “So That You Can Live Popular Memory,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 19 (1982).

[28] Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions (London: BFI 1994), 142.

[29] Colin Perry, “History, Landscape, Nation: British Independent Film and Video in the 1970s and 1980s”, Moving Image Review and Art Journal 6, no. 1-2 (2017); Raymond Williams, The Country and The City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

[30] Sue Aspinall and Mandy Merck, “So That You Can Live, II”, Screen 23, no. 3-4 (1982): 159.

[31] J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape”, in Landscape and Power ed. by W. J. T. Mitchell, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2002), 14.

[32] Darren Devine, “US Photographer Bruce Davidson’s Iconic Images of South Wales Valleys Life Fetch More Than £5000 at Auction,” Wales Online, September 30, 2014, accessed May 1, 2025, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/photographer-bruce-davidsons-iconic-images-7860714.

[33] Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley? (Penguin Modern Classics, 2001; first published 1939).

[34] Raymond Williams, “The Welsh Industrial Novel” in Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 2005), 164.

[35] Gwyn Thomas, All Things Betray Thee (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986; first published 1949), 99.

[36] Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution, trans. Alfred Ehrenfeld (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).

[37] Kristin Ross, The Commune Form (London: Verso, 2024), 19-20.

[38] Willemen notes this demand for landscapes to be “read as palimpsests” (Looks and Frictions, 154).

[39] Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes, “Introduction: The Matter of Places,” in Taking Place: Location and the Moving-Image, ed. Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xv.

[40] Sue Aspinall and Raymond Williams, “This Sadder Recognition – Interview with Raymond Williams,” Screen 23, no. 3-4 (1982).

[41] Ibid., 147.

[42] Ibid., 152.

[43] Such a claim emerges from Willemen’s work on the “mode of address.” See Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions. (London: BFI, 1994).

[44] Similarly, Aspinall and Merck critique the film’s depiction of the unified family as a form to reflect a class that neglects the contradictions internal to the family. Aspinall and Merck, “So That You Can Live, II,” Screen 23, no. 3-4 (1982): 159.

[45] Colin Perry, “History, Landscape and Nation: British Independent Film and Video in the 1970s and 1980s”.

[46] E.g., Daniel Martin, “The Left Behind: Precarity, Place and Racial Identity in the Contemporary ‘Serious Drama’,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 20, no. 1 (2023).

[47] Benjamin Crais, “Cultivating History: Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line and the Cinema of Agriarian Transition,” Discourse 45, no. 1-2 (2023).

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Bibliography

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Aspinall, Sue, and Raymond Williams . “This Sadder Recognition – Interview with Raymond Williams.” Screen 23, no. 3-4 (1982): 144-152.

Brenner, Robert. The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005. London: Verso, 2006.

Cameron, Gavin, John Muellbauer, and Jonathon Snicker. “A Study in Structural Change: Relative Earnings in Wales Since the 1970s.” Regional Studies, 36, no. 1 (2002): 1-11.

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in ‘70s Britain. London: Routledge, 1982.

Cooke, Philip. “Dependency, Supply Factors and Uneven Development in Wales and Other Problem Regions.” Regional Studies 16, no.3 (1982): 221-227.

Crais, Benjamin. “Cultivating History: Sergei Eisenstein’s The General Line and the Cinema of Agrarian Transition.” Discourse 45, no.1-2 (2023): 138-169.

Devine, Darren. “US Photographer Bruce Davidson’s Iconic Images of South Wales Valleys Life Fetch More Than £5000 at Auction.” Wales Online, September 30, 2014. Accessed May 1, 2025.  https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/nostalgia/photographer-bruce-davidsons-iconic-images-7860714. 

Dickinson, Margaret, ed. Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90. London: BFI, 1999.

Dixon, Oliver. “The Chronotopes of Radical Film: Collective Exhibition and the Social Practice of ‘Cinema Action’.” Moving Image Review and Art Journal 14, no.1 (2025): 11-28.

Freidman, Lester, ed. Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Gooberman, Leon, and Ben Curtis. “The age of factories: the rise and fall of manufacturing in south Wales, 1945–1985.” In New Perspectives on Welsh Industrial History, edited by Louise Miskell, 143-160. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020. 

Gorfinkel, Elena, and John David Rhodes. “Introduction: The Matter of Places.” In Taking Place: Location and the Moving-Image, edited by Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes, vii-xxix. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 

Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis. London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1978.

Johnston, Claire. “So That You Can Live Popular Memory.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 19 (1982): 12-16.

Kohlmann, Benjamin, and Ivana Perica. “Introduction: Peripheral Europes.” Critical Quarterly 65, no.4 (2023): 3-11.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution. Translated by Alfred Ehrenfeld. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969. 

Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley?. Penguin Modern Classics, 2001. First Published 1939.

Mann, Robin, and Steve Fenton. National, Class and Resentment: The Politics of National Identity in England, Scotland and Wales. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Martin, Daniel. “The Left Behind: Precarity, Place and Racial Identity in the Contemporary ‘Serious’ Drama.” Journal of British Cinema and Television 20, no.1 (2023): 1-24.

Mitchell, W. J. T. “Imperial Landscape.” In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell. 5-34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 

Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain. London: Verso, 1981.

Perry, Colin. “History, Landscape, Nation: British Independent Film and Video in the 1970s and 1980s.” Moving Image Review and Art Journal 6, no. 1-2 (2017): 24-37.

Ross, Kristin. The Commune Form. London: Verso, 2024.

Thomas, Gwyn. All Things Betray Thee. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986. First Published 1949.

Willemen, Paul. Looks and Frictions. London: BFI, 1994. 

Williams, Gwyn Alf. When Was Wales?. London: Penguin, 1985.

Williams, John. “The Rise and Decline of the Welsh Economy, 1890-1930.” In Class, Community and the Labour Movement: Wales and Canada, 1850-1930, edited by Deian R. Hopkin and Gregory S. Kealey, 7-17. Cardiff: Llafur/CCLH, 1989.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and The City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Williams, Raymond. “The Welsh Industrial Novel.” In Culture and Materialism, 239-258. London: Verso, 2020. 

 

Filmography

Akenfield. 1974. Dir. Peter Hall.

Coal Face. 1935. Dir. Alberto Cavalcanti. 

Every Valley. 1957. Dir. Michael Clarke.

Fighting the Bill. 1970. Dir. Cinema Action.

Fortini/Cani. 1976. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

How Green Was My Valley. 1941. Dir. John Ford.

In the Forest. 1978. Dir. Phil Mulloy.

Maeve. 1981. Dir. Pat Murphy.

Penda’s Fen. 1974. Dir. Alan Clarke

So That You Can Live. 1981. Dir. Cinema Action.

The Passenger. 1975. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni.

Too Early/Too Late. 1981. Dir. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

UCS1. 1971. Dir. Cinema Action.

Winstanley. 1975. Dir. Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo.

 

Biography 

Oliver Dixon is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. His PhD research investigates the history of British independent film and film theory in the long 1970s. Reading the long 1970s as an interregnum period of crisis and transition away from the post-war class compromise into the neoliberal hegemony, he locates the radical practices and theory of the independent film movement as mediations of this transition. His thesis extrapolates the movement’s theory of and organisation as ‘cinema as social practice’, which uniquely enabled it to capture the era’s emergent expressions of the class relation and work with/for developing political movements. His article on the exhibition practices of the Cinema Action film collective was published in Moving Image Review and Art Journal. He also programmes film screenings for Welsh arts organisations and the London Short Film Festival.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2708

 

In her study on the folkloric figure of the pontianak in Malay animism and the history of her cinematic representations, Rosalind Galt’s Alluring Monsters adopts a multi-method, multi-scalar approach that contests Western film scholarship’s adherence to its own film-historical canon(s). “When we come up against the challenge of ‘adapting’ Western scholarship to think non-Western film histories,” Galt notes, “we fall prey to a colonialist mindset.”[1]Informed by “a methodology that takes in an expansive view of what might constitute the politics and aesthetics of postcoloniality,” Galt’s project “aim[s] to contribute to a decolonisation of the [horror] genre” rather than “situat[ing] horror genre studies as a neutral set of concepts to be applied to a new set of films.”[2] “To insist on Malay cinema ascinema itself,” Galt asserts, “we have to pay attention to how the category of world cinema is constituted and what it means to locate the worldly within the particular.”[3] Navigating alternative meanings of horror, and locating these meanings within a non-Western national context where the sectoral operations of cinema were always already transnational, Alluring Monsters demonstrates the ways in which a methodology of decolonisation in the study of world cinemas allows radically different entries into a genealogy of horror film: a genealogy that decolonises, in provincializing, the dominant film-historical canons associated with the horror genre. Galt’s genealogy troubles the normative geopolitics of canonisation in film studies.

Although the academic study of horror film has become increasingly established in recent years, the study of the transnationalism of horror cinema and its revival in non-Western national contexts is relatively limited. While the transnational approaches are discussed in key anthologies on international horror,[4] and a handful of later collections devoted to particular national horror traditions, including Asian and European national contexts,[5] there is still much to be said about the specifically transnational dynamics of horror filmmaking, its circulation, and its diverse trends or “waves.” Aligning with what Galt proposes as an “expansive” methodology (that attends to local and trans-local meanings of horror and its geopolitics of intelligibility and reception), the core objective of my project, entitled Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics,[6] is to explore the revival of folkloric representations through a critical approach that does not prioritise the Anglo-American and European legacies of horror film as the only point of entry into a genealogy of folk horror, but propose polycentric constellations of horror and its transnational development as genre and/or mode. The proliferation of these new folk horror narratives is a global phenomenon and the vast scale of its revival, and its histories, is relatively under-researched.

This article proposes an alternative methodology to the study of transnationalism and horror film, that attends to the curatorial affordances of film studies and its engagement with the canon (and the canonising practices). Following an analysis of existing curatorial approaches to frame the “folk horror revival”[7] in transnational settings, I will focus on the themed selection of film screenings, Mined Zone: Folk Horror, which I curated for the International Istanbul Film Festival (8-19 April 2022). The screening programme aimed to introduce Istanbul’s festival audiences to geographically diverse representations of folk horror in world cinema. Engaging with the recent revival of folk horror narratives featuring witches, shamans, trolls, djinns, demons, black magic and other folkloric-paranormal phenomena, the selection ranged from contemporary examples to historically significant examples of folk horror. In parallel to these screenings curated with the support of MUBI Türkiye and the festival programming team in Istanbul, I also edited a folk horror dossier published in Turkey’s leading film magazine Altyazı, which included the Turkish translations of the project participants’ original contributions to the dossier reviewing a selection of films programmed for the festival, and the films released and promoted by MUBI Türkiye as part of the festival’s Mined Zone programme. Critically reflecting on the curatorial possibilities and limitations of (i) de-westernising film criticism and horror spectatorship, and (ii) facilitating cross-cultural mobility of non-Anglophone horror cinema through an anti-canonising approach to horror-as-genre, this article will provide a critical account of transnationalism to understand the contemporary revival of folk horror narratives and its reception in international festival settings.

Aporetic Terms in the Humanities, and the Curatorial Affordances of Film Studies

Any field in arts and humanities, that is informed by contemporary critical theory, must engage with aporetic and ambivalent concepts. While the extent to which such concepts are productive in terms of their politics of ambivalence is debatable, they bear methodological – and curatorial – affordances to transform the disciplinary norms of knowledge production (e.g. “queer,” “decolonial,” “transnational,” “political,” “global/local,” “genre,” and “canon”). The aporia such concepts point to also “provokes a crisis in representation, but crucially we have some sense of it, we know there is something to be sought.”[8] Such ambivalences in concept-based methodologies of arts and humanities are not always critically and politically progressive. The “market forces” could also invest in the commercially productive ambivalences of such terms, which aspire to measure “success” through metrics investing in such ambivalences (e.g. equality, diversity, decolonisation, employability, etc). How individuals and institutions could interpret these aporetic, yet trendsetting, terms – creatively and innovatively – raise curatorial questions.

For this study, I will be focusing on the conceptual ambivalences of “horror” and “transnational”. While the former turns into a problematic genre category in recent re-interpretations of “folk horror,” the latter is an often-contested term in film studies – as a descriptive and prescriptive marker for filmmaking practices and their national affiliations. To be able to address the curatorial affordances of such key concepts in film studies, one needs to theorise “the curatorial.” While film studies have always been involved with curatorial frameworks that contest, critique, revise, or expand the (film-historical) canons, there is no established theoretical tradition (in the field) dedicated to “the curatorial” yet. I argue that the debates on curation in the field of contemporary visual arts bear significant potentials to inform the field of film studies, particularly its critical framings of the canonical.

In his response to Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff’s conceptualisation of “the curatorial,”[9] Simon Sheikh notes that “the use of the curatorial is […] an analytical tool and a philosophical proposition, and by indication, a separate form of knowledge production that may actually not involve the curating of exhibitions, but rather the process of producing knowledge and making curatorial constellations that can be drawn from the historical forms and practices of curating.”[10] Treating the curatorial as “a specific mode of research that may or may not take on the spatial and temporal form of an exhibition,” Sheikh reflects on the paradoxes of the “inclusion/exclusion game” in practices of curation that invest in revising and/or expanding the (art-historical) canon:

Exhibitions as statements are (…) not dependent on individual subjects and their agency, but entangled in a web of statements, present as past, that both contradict and condition each other. And you are, principally, always allowed to disagree with the selection. Which is not to say that they do not deal in cultural hierarchies and hegemonies, but rather that these are not definite, but rather that they work with inclusion and exclusion, representation and de-presentation as constitutive of the field, and thus with an essential instability despite the perceived solidity of tradition, nation, and the walls of the institution, or what can be established as the canon. Now, in contemporary art and from art history we know that only very little is won by trying to include the excluded in the canon, since it works and maintains itself exactly through this inclusion/exclusion game. The inclusion of the excluded will again always be limited to only a select few individuals from whichever chosen excluded group, who will then have to suffer the indignity of representing this group forever. The canon only holds individuals, as works or subjects, and not contexts and histories. Instead of trying to expand the canon, it should be disposed of altogether.[11]

Here, Sheikh cites Stefan Nowotny’s proposition of “anti-canonisation” as a progressive response to the contemporary curatorial practices’ engagement with the canonical. Referring to the anti-canonising drive in Foucault’s conceptualisation of genealogy,[12] Nowotny asserts that “[w]hat could come into view through this kind of [anti-canonising] perspective is not so much – or at least not solely – the question of the respective critical assessment of art institutions, and certainly not of a canon, but rather an open field of a knowledge of action, a practical knowledge that rejects reintegration into the form of ends specific to art and in which the difference of institutional critique is actualized.”[13] The “anti-canonising knowledge,” Nowotny notes, is differential because it does not allow itself, being resistive, to be subjected to any authorized discursive field, to any authorization by a dominant discourse, but instead recognizes the power effects found in the separation of knowledge, yet without composing itself into a new totality of knowledge. Hence as plural knowledge it also does not “organize” itself under a unified form, but rather in an open, non-dialectical game of concurrence.[14]

Guided by these debates on “the curatorial” and its critical engagements with the canon, the next section will address the conceptual functions of folk horror (and horror, as genre) in the context(s) of its contemporary revival. The ambivalence embedded in the re-framings of “folk horror” bear the potential for horror studies to contest the normative film-historical canon, and to decolonise the field through an examination of alternative geographies – and genealogies – of genre film. Tracing the contemporary revival of folk horror through a lens of transnationalism, this study aims to incorporate Nowotny’s “anti-canonisation” (and Sheikh’s re-interpretation) into its curatorial framework.

Folk Horror within and beyond the Canon

Rather than pursuing an inclusive, global re-imagination of “folk horror” as a cohesive genre category, my project aims to explore how representations of folklore creep into different registers of filmmaking, with potentials to de-canonise national and international histories of horror cinema. This section addresses the ways in which contemporary debates and practices on folk horror question its affiliations with canons and genres. In his review of Valdimar Jóhansson’s film Lamb (2021), the film scholar Adrian Martin contests the critical reception of the film as “folk horror” in arguing that the film “resists folk horror tag” through its innovative style which does not sit harmoniously with the genre affiliations of horror (or “folk horror” specifically). Martin discusses his reservations over the contemporary hype around “folk horror” as follows:

 If the mythological figure of Dracula, for example, is to be taken under the umbrella of a nation’s folklore, then there seems precious little difference between virtually every well-established form of supernatural horror (taking in witchcraft, aliens, vampires, ghosts, spirits, zombies, demonic forces, etc., etc.) – thus covering the vast majority of horror films – and this new-fangled consumer tag of folk horror, already enthusiastically seized on for “curated marketing” purposes by, for example, the American “niche streaming” enterprise Shudder. What is the point, precisely, of separating folk horror out from the overall supernatural soup of the horror genre? I am yet to be convinced of the efficacy of this gesture.[15]

However, Lamb’s ambivalent involvement with the modes and tropes of folk horror demonstrates a more complex set of relations that are originally embedded within the Anglo-American and European legacies of folk horror. As I will discuss in detail, the revival of folk horror does not only augment the “curated marketing” purposes but also re-imagine the folk horror’s aporetic conceptuality in the (film-historical) canon.

In an interview featured in Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), Adam Scovell reflects on his study Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) which explores the British legacy of folk horror, and notes:

One of the big mistakes that I made – and that is still continuing to be made about it – is that [folk horror] is and does function as a genre. I think the best way to see it is as a mode … Folk horror works like [a mode] along with other modes such as psychogeography, hauntology, urban weird, English eerie… All these modes are interlinked but they don’t quite function as one cohesive genre. They’re interrelated in more complex ways.[16]

Scovell’s commentary above is located in Woodlands Dark’s final chapter (i.e. Chapter 6: “Folk Horror Revival”) which arrives after the penultimate Chapter 5: “All the Haunts Be Hours: Folk Horror Around the Word.” While internationalizing her documentary’s historical framework, Janisse’s expansion of the film-historical canon to “folk horror around the world” makes the operations of “folk horror”-as-genre more complex yet less cohesive. In other words, this expansion of folk horror’s British and American legacies compromises cohesion in favour of complexity, which Janisse’s inclusion of Scovell’s concluding remarks in the film’s final chapter (as cited above) corroborates.

How folk horror operates as a “consumer tag” in national and transnational settings, and how it obscures or elevates the political potentials of folklore, do indeed work as highly relevant questions that shape my project’s framework. Taking the geopolitics of canonisation in film studies scholarship as the key object of scrutiny, the project’s questions around the “folk horror revival” and “transnational horror” gain curatorial affordances as the ambivalences of “horror”s meanings and histories in transnational contexts of film criticism consolidate a polycentric vision of film history making any act of inclusion in (and exclusion from) a global canon ideologically shaped and (geopolitically) situated – thus curated.

I will start with three recent attempts to locate “folk horror” within curated histories of horror cinema. These histories are curatorial attempts to imagine, through particular modes of celebratory revisionism, a film-historical canon that re-categorises and re-conceptualises horror film. Part of the AMC Visionaries project, my first example is Eli Roth’s History of Horror (2018-2021), which is a three-season TV series that selects and categorises horror films to re-canonise a history of horror cinema. While its first season engages with the most familiar (i.e. “canonical”) themes in the history of American horror i.e. zombies, slashers, killer creatures, demonic possession, vampires, and ghost stories, the second season continues with haunted houses, monsters, body horror, witches, and “chilling children” – followed by the season’s final, sixth episode titled “Nine Nightmares.” The episode starts with Roth’s voiceover: “I want to introduce you to nine uncategorizable films that pushed the boundaries of horror”. Within the “uncategorisable,” Roth includes Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Get Out (2017), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), Juan Piquer Simon’s Pieces (1982), Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). In his revisionist “curation” of an Anglo-American film-historical canon of horror cinema, Roth’s inclusion of The Wicker Man, a British folk horror classic, and Midsommar, one of the most known contemporary examples of the “folk horror revival,” under the rubric of the “uncategorisable,” demonstrates the categorical ambivalence that folk horror creates in such instances of celebratory historical accounts.

My second example is Severin Films’ Blu-ray box set, titled All The Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror(2021), which re-integrates folk horror into the film-historical canon in revising and expanding the normative curatorial frameworks that marginalise “folk horror” as “uncategorisable.” Proud of its inclusion of nineteen “best-known, least-known, rarely-seen and thought-lost classics of folk horror from around the world, all restored from the best available vault elements with Special Features that include short films, audio commentaries and exclusive featurettes,” the compendium’s curatorial framework moves beyond Eli Roth’s exclusive focus on American horror. However, the compendium’s “world” of “folk horror” seems to be defined by an Anglophone and Eurocentric film-historical canon. The selection of nineteen films includes key Australian productions of “indigenous horror” and “occult horror” (Mario Andreacchio’s The Dreaming [1988], James Bogle’s Kadaicha [1988], Ann Turner’s Celia [1989] and Ian Coughlan Alison’s Birthday [1981]), Konstantin Ershov & Georgiy Kropachyov’s Soviet classic Viy (1967), the Nordic productions Kåre Bergstrøm’s Lake of the Dead (1958) and Viðar Víkingsson’s Tilbury (1987), Đorđe Kadijević ’s Serbian film Leptirica (1973), and the Czech horror classic Otakar Vávra’s Witchhammer (1970). The selection features films from Poland (Marek Piestrak’s Wilczyca [1983] and Janusz Majewski’s Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach [1970]), Canada (Ryszard Bugajski’s Clearcut [1991]), and Italy (Brunello Rondi’s Il Demonio [1963]) – while also including the Russia-UK-Ukraine-Italy co-production Dark Waters (Baino 1993), and Avery Crounse’s Eyes of Fire (1983). Rather than including the British examples which were often regarded as “the unholy trinity of films that gave birth to folk horror,” namely Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), the selection hosts a more eclectic mix of British films that attempt to reinvent folk horror: James MacTaggart’s Robin Redbreast (1970), Alan Clarke Penda’s Fen (1974), Chris Newby’s Anchoress (1993), and Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2012). Compendium’s framework gains further critical nuance with its inclusion of Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021), which provides a comprehensive account of the ways in which “folk horror” became part of the film-historical canon world-wide. While the inclusion of Janisse’s film extendsCompendium’s imagination of the film-historical canon to other (i.e. non-Anglophone and non-European) cinematic legacies of folk horror, Janisse’s attempt to internationalise her documentary’s curated history also deserves critical examination.

Woodlands Dark combines expository, participatory, and poetic modes of documentary filmmaking.[17] While its poetic mode comes from the film’s essayistic method of compiling and mixing filmic images that share visual and thematic associations with various tropes of folklore, mythology, and horror, it is complemented by a participatory documentary mode that is shaped by the reflections and testimonials from practitioners and academics filmed in the “talking heads” format. The film opens with a rich array of definitions of folk horror: “based upon the juxtaposition between the prosaic and the uncanny,” “about being lost in ancient landscapes,” “ancients wisdoms that have been long repressed and forgotten rise up again – very often to the consternation of a complacent modern man,” “illegitimate culture …outside civilisation and modernity … sustained by the will of the people, the folk.”[18]

The film locates the first uses of “folk horror” within the history of European and British literature, particularly Gothic literature. This genealogical point of entry develops a historical account that is shaped by the industrial revolution and its effects on the British countryside, which lays the ground of Janisse’s identification of the British roots of folk horror informed by class antagonisms and a psychogeography of the countryside layered by “psychic imprints” of people. This British point of entry in the film leads the way to a chapter on “witchcraft and paganism” followed by a chapter on “American folk horror.” Janisse develops a framework that compares the British legacy of folk horror with the American horror’s ideological imprint: its colonial history of settlement – operating through the trope of the “Indian burial ground”. Janisse stretches the categorical boundaries of “folk horror” by including “hillbilly horror” or “backwoods horror” (with references to Toby Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974]) and horror films about urban myths/legends such as Candyman (1992). The “psycho-geographical pull [of the South in “hillbilly horror” and the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Candyman]” embedded in these films, Woodlands Dark suggests, is what makes them relevant to “American folk horror.”

Within its six-chapter narration over 193 minutes, Woodlands Dark dedicates its fifth chapter to “Folk Horror around the World.” The transition from the fourth chapter on American folk horror to the fifth chapter is accompanied by Janisse’s brief exposition: “Folk horror tends to have a lot of cultural and geographic specificity but when you start to look at it from a global perspective, those films are often speaking to each other in really interesting ways.”[19] While the chapter acknowledges a number of films included in Severin Films’ Compendium (i.e. examples of Australian “indigenous horror,” Eastern European productions, and Nordic horror films), it extends the compendium’s international framework to other non-Western national traditions of horror, e.g. the La Llorona films from Mexico (Ramón Peón’s La Llorona [1933], Miguel M. Delgado’s The Revenge of the Crying Woman [1974], and Rafael Baledón’s The Curse of the Crying Woman [1961]) and Guatemala (Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona [2019]), a selection of Brazilian horror films (Maurice Capovila’s Noites de Iemanjá  [1971], Carlos Hugo Christensen’s Leonora Dos Sete Mares [1955], Walter Hugo Khouri’s As Filhas Do Fogo [1978], José  Mojica Marins’s The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe [1974]), Japanese tradition of ghost horror films (Onibaba [1964], Kuroneko [1968], Black Cat Mansion [1958], Kobayashi’s Kwaidan [1964], Shunichi Nagasaki’s Shikoku [1999], Koji Shiraishi’s Noroi: The Curse [2005]), horror productions from the Soviet Union (Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors [1965], Aleksandr Rou’s May Nights [1952], Valeri Rubinchik’s Savage Hunt of King Stakh [1980]), and brief references to a limited number of Southeast Asian examples of folk horror (e.g. Mike de Leon’s The Rites of May [1977] from the Philippines, and Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak [1999] from Thailand).

Interestingly, the participatory mode dominating the first four chapters is replaced by a poetic mode of documentation that compiles images from “folk horror around the world” through visual associations and tropes of horror that Janisse’s “global perspective” grounds. The focus on “sacred indigenous sites” in Australian folk horror leads to the memory of genocide in the dybbuk movies (e.g. Marcyn Wrona’s Demon [2015] and Michał Waszyński’s The Dybbuk [1937]), which allows a transition to the themes of “national trauma” and “collective guilt” observed in Mexican La Llorona films. Using the maternal associations of water in the global horror canon, the film “surfs” from Mexican folk horror to Nordic and Japanese traditions of horror. The Australian “indigenous horror” frequently comes back as a comparative reference when the narrative compilation points to thematic connections with settler-colonialism as a horror theme. Overall, then, the nuance and rigour with which American and British traditions are compared to one another is replaced by a universalist (and transnational) mode of “worlding” folk horror – formally registered by a documentary mode of poetic essayism. What is meant by Janisse’s reference to “a global perspective” prioritises a comparative attention to transnational resonances of folk horror’s operations rather than an acknowledgement of the possibility of creating another “history of folk horror” with an entirely different geographic point of entry into an alternative genealogy. In his contribution to Altyazı’s special dossier (i.e. an output of the project, which I will discuss later), Iain Smith also expresses his reservations regarding Janisse’s acts of “worlding” folk horror: where the early sections of the documentary provide a concrete sense of the British historical and cultural context, this later section on folk horror titles from around the world becomes more digressive, highlighting the overlapping nature of folk horror across all these different national traditions but not always having the space to adequately address the specific sociohistorical context in each case. This relates to the broader challenge of applying a framework largely derived from British cinema to films from around the world – at once aiming to de-Westernise the concept by reframing it through a global selection of case studies, while also nevertheless reinforcing the centrality of Western frameworks for understanding these diverse traditions.[20]

What Woodlands Dark’s “global perspective” omits, then, are the rich traditions of horror in the cinemas of Egypt, Philippines, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, and South Korea, which are significantly informed by religion-folklore syncretisms. While some of the horror film traditions in some of these contexts (e.g. Bollywood, Nollywood, and the cinema of the Philippines) may be considered to operate under what Iain Smith conceptualises as “the Hollywood meme,”[21] the majority of these traditions combines horror with other modes or local genre conventions in such a way that the meanings of horror-as-category becomes situated knowledge. Recalling what Sheikh considers as “the inclusion/exclusion game” embedded in the curatorial aspirations to revise or expand the canons, I argue that the absences in Janisse’s documentary demonstrates the need for an anti-canonising curatorial approach to transnational horror. If one genuinely aspires to decolonise our understanding of folklore and horror in transnational settings of “world cinemas,” alternative genealogies should be pursued – rather than making “folk horror around the world” a comparative supplement to the hegemonic film-historical canon.

Another alternative method to resist hegemonic canons could take the form of what Alexander Jovčić-Sas’s study (on the Bauhaus centenary) conceptualises as “parallel canonisation,” which operates as a triangulation of the curatorial modes of revisionism, anti-canonisation, and “minor histories.”[22] For example, the HBO production Folklore (2018-2020) – a two-season thirteen-episode TV series with each episode dedicated to one horror story about an Asian folkloric spirit (e.g. wewe gombel [Indonesia], pontianak [Singapore], zashiki-warashi [Japan], toyol [Malaysia], pob[Thailand], mongdal [Korea], etc.) – is shaped by a pragmatically curated regionalism that brands “Asia” as an alternative “centre” for another lineage, a “parallel canon,” of folk horror. What my British Academy project was after, however, is not a “parallel canon” of regionally (and nationally) specific horror traditions but a more relational genealogy of folk horror that is informed by a curatorial mode of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation.

Critical Transnationalism as Anti-Canonisation

A critical framing of the “folk horror revival” requires a nuanced understanding of “the transnational”: Does it mark specific cultural practices or is it a mode of relations through which one could assess all cultural practices? In their critical account of the “proliferation of the term “transnational” as a potentially empty, floating signifier,” Higbee and Lim calls for a “critical transnationalism [that] might help us interpret more productively the interface between local and global, national and transnational, as well as moving away from a binary approach to national/transnational and from a Eurocentric tendency of how such films might be read.” [23] A “critical transnationalism,” Higbee and Lim assert, “does not ghettoise transnational film-making in interstitial and marginal spaces but rather interrogates how these film-making activities negotiate with the national on all levels – from cultural policy to financial sources, from the multiculturalism of difference to how it reconfigures the nation’s image of itself.”[24] “A critical transnationalism,” then, “must … be attendant to the dynamics of the specific historical, cultural and ideological contexts in the production and reception of each particular film.”[25]

To be able to put “critical transnationalism” into practice, we need a multi-scalar, multi-method framework to diversify the dominant analytical tools of studying genre and canon in “world cinemas.” By multi-scalar, I mean a dynamic methodology that moves between different geographic units. By multi-method, I mean combined methodological approaches that operate across categorial, textual, and generic distinctions, and pay more attention to the frictions of global mobility, differences in audience reception, and sectoral specificities. Therefore, critical transnationalism bears the potential to intervene into the dominant film-historical canons. Correspondingly, in his critique of horror scholarship (and genre studies more generally) and its adherence to “canon and consensus,” Mark Jancovich makes the following observations:

… a lot of writing on horror still continues to discuss the genre in terms that pay little or no attention to contemporary developments in genre theory and replicate what have become canonical accounts of the genre’s thematic or stylistic development or its formal or ideological identity. (…) Indeed, it is both surprising and depressing to see a genre, whose study is so often claimed to challenge existing hierarchies, being studied in terms of canons and consensus. Not only do most histories offer the same periodizations and landmark films, with little variety until the end of the book when the author brings the story up to date, but the theoretical studies often continue to suggest that there is something called the horror film that exists as a stable and consistent body of work, in which history is a process similar to the development of a biological organism: the organism remains constant, even if individual organisms mature, age and eventually die.[26]

Locating horror as a genre with inherently “anti-canonising” drives to “challenge existing hierarchies,” Jancovich asserts that studying horror “in terms of canons and consensus” is problematic and unproductive. In dialogue with Jancovich’s critique of horror scholarship, Lobato and Ryan propose “an alternative way of doing genre studies, based on an analysis of distributive circuits rather than film texts or generic categories,” which “provide[s] a conceptual framework that can account for the multiple ways in which distribution networks leave their traces on film texts and audience expectations, with specific reference to international horror networks.”[27] Exploring “distributor-driven attempts to reframe and re- canonize international horror,” Lobato and Ryan makes a convincing case of the “mutability of genre at the point of distribution.”[28]

Informed by these critical observations on the norms of genre studies scholarship, my project Transnational Horror, Folklore and Cultural Politics proposes critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation, a practice-based method that pays a particular attention to the curatorial components of the international distribution of horror film. The project’s key aims include: (i) to generate new conceptual and methodological tools that effectively engage with cross-cultural mobilities of folk horror; (ii) to integrate critical issues of scale, regionality, and geopolitics into the categorical complexities of national/transnational/world cinemas; and (iii) to investigate the ways in which the post-millennial revival of folk horror operates across different spatial units (i.e. local, sub-national, national, regional, continental, transnational, and global). Ultimately, the notion of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation aims to encourage scholars of transnational film to attend to the curatorial affordances of film studies by allowing practice-based research to deliver “rigour” in new platforms of knowledge production that works differently than the field’s default valorisation of and investment in close film analysis. The following two sections explore the curatorial approach I sought to implement in the project Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics.

Curating Mined Zone: Folk Horror for Istanbul International Film Festival (2022)

Informed by the critical reflections (discussed above) on the recent curatorial approaches that have framed the folk horror revival through canonical (or canonising) approaches, a significant number of outputs produced as part of the project Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics aimed to test an alternative practice-based method that prioritises the curatorial affordances of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation. The project’s approach to anti-canonisation is shaped by two areas of practice-based research: crossover festival programming and (non-Anglophone) film journalism. For the former, I curated a “folk horror” programme for the Mined Zone section of the International Istanbul Film Festival (8-19 April 2022). For the latter, in collaboration with Altyazı, I acted as guest editor for a themed magazine issue/dossier on “Folk Horror: Yerel Kâbuslar, Küresel Furyalar [Folk Horror: Local Nightmares, Global Trends]” published in April 2022 – with the scholarly contributions authored by the project participants and then translated into Turkish.

Curating folk horror for a film festival, whose programming practices significantly resonate with the Eurocentric canonisations of “world cinemas,” allowed me to question the currency of the horror genre in the art-house film festival circuit, including the frictions of crossover mobility in negotiating what gets to be shown and what not.[29] The festival team’s scepticism of horror-as-genre was predictable (due to the festival’s established networks with the art-house film festival circuit [e.g. Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, London, Toronto, etc.]); yet, the generic ambivalence of folk horror – as well as its historical connections with art film – facilitated a positive conversation with the festival director and the programming team.

Commissioned practices of curation involve a continuous process of negotiation that does not necessarily guarantee full curatorial autonomy. During my preliminary conversations with the festival director, we agreed on some protocols. Although folk horror (as genre/mode), in dominant and alternative film-historical canons, shows a striking mobility across art-house cinema, cult film, and the local/transnational forms of popular/mainstream filmmaking, a set of limits had to be agreed upon. For the programme to match the IIFF’s “brand” and its target audiences, we agreed that the selection should prioritise a contemporary focus on folk horror that accommodates recent examples of its revival, produced in contexts of art-house or middlebrow film. While the festival’s programmers allowed me to select a very limited number of “historical” examples that allow folk horror to be considered as global cult film heritage or as a mode constitutive of the work of some auteurs of world cinema, the team preferred the contemporary (and recently released) films to dominate the programme.

The festival team allocated this themed programme of screenings to their Mined Zone/Mayınlı Bölge section, which has been appearing in the festival programme over the last few decades. The section has never had a thematic focus, but it had a mission to capture a particular set of films, and feature “young,” paradigm-shifting voices of cinema. IIFF’s promotional text for the 2019 and 2020 installations of Mined Zone reads as follows:

These unusual, extraordinary, ground-breaking, edgy and “challenging” films outside the mainstream with their style, form, approach, technique or narrative will be attractive especially for cinephiles looking for some thrills. Restless cinematic spirits roam in the Mined Zone.[30]

Describing the section’s scope, the adjectives used above imply a curatorial drive to include recently produced films that would escape the art-house film festival circuit’s canonising framework. Previous Mined Zone entries included Magnus von Hom’s Sweat (2020), Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday (2018), Brendan Walters’ Spell (2018), Maud Alpi’s Still Life (2016), Julia Docournau’s Raw (2016), and Amat Escalante’s The Untamed (2016). The programme’s drive to capture “edgy” films that “challenge” with their “style, form, approach, technique or narrative” could also be taken as an ambition to show films with uneasy alignments with the canon(ical). The festival team’s enthusiasm for such “edginess” had proven productive for this project, which was seeking to implement a curatorial practice through critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation. The programming team agreed on a revised text for the 2022 programme of Mined Zone: Folk Horror:

This themed selection aims to introduce Istanbul’s festival audiences to geographically diverse representations of folk horror in world cinema. Curated by Cüneyt Çakırlar, the films in this section range from contemporary examples to historically significant masterpieces of horror film, engaging with the recent revival of the folk horror genre featuring witches, shamans, trolls, djinns, demons, black magic and other paranormal phenomena. Restless cinematic spirits still roam in the Mined Zone.[31]

The initial selection pitched to the programming team consisted of 31 films that range from contemporary to historical examples of folk horror from various national and industrial contexts. The festival programming team requested me to de-select the “folk horror”-affiliated films previously shown in the IIFF, e.g. Ali Abbasi’s Border, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb, Bustamante’s La Llorona, Scott Cooper’s Antlers (2021), Kleber Mendalcho Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau (2019), and Romola Garai’s Amulet (2020). The “non-Western” titles I proposed, which do not entail a strong affinity with global cult canon or with the dominant brands of art-house cinema got de-selected. These included Sisworo Gautama Putra’s Sundel Bolong (1981), Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan (2021), and Yuthlert Sippapart’s Krasue Valentine (2006). “Locally” produced Asian films whose distributors the festival team struggled reaching out and securing a mutually convenient agreement also got deselected, which included Japanese horror films Nobuo Nakagawa’s Black Cat Mansion (1958), Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968), and the jiangshi films from the golden age of Hong Kong cinema such as Mr. Vampire (1985).

Despite these constraints and theory-practice tensions, the final selection the team agreed on managed to not only cover a geographic diversity but also accommodate diverse stylistic and thematic approaches to the filmic horror-folklore nexus. The discussion of the selected films, below, will make use of the reviews the project participants have authored for the special dossier I edited for the Turkish film magazine Altyazı, which worked as a crucial curatorial paratext for the festival team’s (and the sponsor MUBI’s) promotion of Mined Zone. This section, then, builds its analytical framework through a citational practice that reanimates the promotional intertextuality produced (and curated) collectively by the project’s academic participants’ film reviews. The next section will discuss the dossier in more detail.

Through the selection of films in Mined Zone: Folk Horror, I aimed to subvert Janisse’s treatment of the Anglo-American film-texts as the canonical centre. Instead of entirely excluding them from the programme, I positioned one example of contemporary British folk horror as a marginal film-text that is instrumentalised as a node of comparison with an example of horror filmmaking produced in the recently booming local film industry of the Republic of Sakha.[32] Thus, rather than including UK-produced contemporary films with obscure yet artful appropriations of British folk horror legacy, e.g. Ruth Paxton’s A Banquet (2021), Mark Jenkins’ Enys Men (2023), Alex Garland’s Men (2022) and Lynne Davison’s Mandrake (2022), I selected a Welsh-language film, Lee Haven Jones’s Gwledd/The Feast (2011): the film’s critique of extractive capitalism operates at the intersections of folk horror and eco-horror, which is comparable to Kostas Marsaan’s Ich-chi (2020) from the Republic of Sakha.

The Feast, according to Johnny Walker, is “a rural ‘revenge of nature’ film cut from the same cloth as cornerstone film like Long Weekend (1978), where ‘the environment’, embodied by the vengeful spirit’s corporeal vessel, resists modern, human, intervention.”[33] The film’s character Cadi, the maid possessed by a vengeful land-spirit, summons a force that antagonises the wealthy Welsh family’s business affairs with a mineral mining company with extractive interests in the Welsh land.  Similarly, Ich-chi uses Yakut shamanist cosmology (i.e. the spirit-master ich-chi) to locate the horrific within the folkloric – antagonising the forces of capitalism destroying tradition and (sacred) land. As Vlad Strukov also notes in his review commissioned by the project, “Ich-chi’s central conflict is about the loss of property—land—to colonial powers of the past and capitalist powers of the present (the main character Timir wants his parents to sell ancestral land to pay off his debt back in the city; credit economy is a new phenomenon in Russia, with many people suffering huge losses).”[34] Both films use folklore to produce horror through a family unit’s exposure to the forces of capitalistic extraction and ecological destruction. 

Mined Zone: Folk Horror programme is also used as an opportunity to respond to the absence of African cinemas in the recent debates on the “folk horror revival,” including Janisse’s Woodlands Dark. While the Nollywood productions of various juju stories (e.g. Living in Bondage [1992]) could be discussed with reference to folklore and horror (and be considered for inclusion), the IIFF’s affinities with alternative (and/or art-house) filmmaking had to shape my selection. Such an urge to include African films (despite the agreed limits of the festival’s programming discourse) runs the risk of what Nowotny regards as the paradoxes of the “inclusion/exclusion games” in revisionist frameworks. However, the two films I selected, namely Surreal 16’s Juju Stories (2021) as an example of Nigerian new wave filmmaking, and Jean Luc Herbulot’s Saloum (2021) from Senegal, served the project’s anti-canonising impulses in not only their contestation of national politics but also their formalist and anti-colonial engagement with folk horror as filmic mode rather than genre.

The collective Surreal 16’s mission “to create artistically minded films that move away from the reigning imperialism of Nollywood aesthetics and production practices” is starkly visible in Juju Stories.[35] Actively separating juju from Nollywood’s genre spectacles (e.g. Living in Bondage), the three short stories in the film (namely “Love Potion,” “Yam,” and “Suffer the Witch”) contest the mainstream uses of juju for “religious propaganda” and presents an alternative approach to folklore and supernatural horror, “where substance is prioritized over glamour”[36] and the legacy of pre-Nollywood anti-colonial Nigerian film is acknowledged.[37] In Juju Stories, the folkloric/folkloresque image – appearing as idioms of horror – seeks to mobilise an ideological critique of mainstream cinema.

Set during the 2003 coup d’état in Guinea-Bissau, the Senegalese production Saloum is a genre-bending western-action-horror hybrid that creates a “metaphysical … realm where the supernatural and the criminal coexist.”[38]Localising – in reinterpreting – “the tropes of the western,” Herbulot’s film authenticates its hybrid mode of “gangster horror” by using references to folklore and mysticism. Through different aesthetic responses to glocalisation, both Juju Stories and Saloum attempt to critically re-imagine the legacy of African cinemas in appropriating idioms of horror and folklore.

Resonating with Saloum in its hybridity, the Chilean stop-motion animation La Casa Lobo / The Wolf House (2018), also selected for Mined Zone, could be considered as another experimental film playing with genre conventions, whose affinities with folk horror are obscure yet productive. “Tak[ing] the folk tale of the Three Little Pigs and filter[ing] it through the warped mind of a profoundly traumatized little girl,” Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña constructs a grim fairy tale inspired Colonia Dignidad – “the cult-like Chilean enclave” founded by German fugitive Paul Schäfer, a sexual predator who “provided shelter to Nazi war criminals like Josef Mengele, and tortured Pinochet’s enemies in exchange for his support.”[39] León and Cociña’s “fascist parable”[40] blends the aesthetic of stop-motion animation with the narrative register of the folk tale, which contributes to The Wolf House’s “filmic folklore,” a term that Juwen Zhang defines as “an imagined folklore that exists only in films and a folklore or folklore-like performance that is represented, created or hybridized in fictional film.”[41]

The programme’s accommodation of the generic and stylistic hybridity, which the conceptual nexus of folklore-horror allows, was not limited to Saloum and The Wolf House. Vibeke Bryld’s essay film Thyland/Elsewhere (2021) was selected to respond to the “proto-ethnographic” drive in the pioneering examples of what Janisse’s canonising account frames as folk horror. Exploring the myths of the North-Western Danish region of Thy, Bryld creates a psychogeography that registers landscape through folklore. Bryld’s aesthetic of essayism, in a mode of haptic drift, seeks to match the regional folklore she cites: Beezlebub/The Invisible Dweller as the “eternal drifter”, merfolk who summon sand drifts and storm, Elder Women passing on “strangeness and insanity” through breastfeeding, Hill Folk abducting young women to bear Hill Men’s children.[42]

The IIFF’s urge to capture contemporary trends in art film has often been accompanied with revisions of the global cinematic canon by celebrating the work of the historically significant auteurs who had a considerable influence on the contemporary art film. In response to this, my selection included a film by Kim Ki-young, an auteur whose work was significantly informed by stylistic excess that subverts genre conventions from within, and inspired generations of Korean filmmakers such as Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. Having worked in the context of state censorship and interference with the film industry during Korea’s military regime in the 1970s, Kim Ki-young was an independent, marginal and transgressive filmmaker whose practice, according to Chung-kang Kim, “far exceeded the cultural and generic norms of the period, a legacy which renders him as one of the most compelling directors in the history of South Korean cinema.”[43] Regarded as a “cinema of diabolical desire and death”[44] in the global film festival circuit, Kim’s work occasionally flirts with shamanism, horror, psychological thriller, and melodrama as narrative and stylistic modes.

Bechervaise notes that Kim’s filmmaking “construct[s] psychological dramas with an expressionistic style rare in Korean cinema.”[45] A powerful example of the director’s later, mid-career cinema, Io Island (1977) not only maintains this excessive engagement with horror and melodrama but also incorporates folklore (through shamanic rituals of exorcism – used as a precedent for its “eco-feminist” critique), gynaehorror (through its story of a matriarchal island community who abuse men for their reproductive interests), and psychogeography (in treating Ioedo as a – metaphorically and conceptually dense – island exploited by modern capitalist market interests, and haunted by spirits). Using folklore as a central narrative tool and a significant driver of horror, Io Island acts as a powerful example of folk horror. Such a reclamation of “deeply rooted belief systems like mugyo, a form of shamanism practiced mainly by women” overtly critiques Korea’s experience of modernity, capitalism, and imperialism.[46]

While the selection of a Kim Ki-young film resonated with the IIFF programming team’s auterist aspirations (using the national and the authorial as the festival’s key commercial paratexts), Mined Zone: Folk Horror’s practice of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation located Io Island within a contemporary context of the folk horror revival. Io Island, as folk horror, neither aligns with a canonising project of “global auteurs” nor fits entirely with the expansionist revisionism in Janisse’s curated history of “folk horror around the world.”  I would argue that Io Island’s inclusion here captures a possibility for auteur cinema to be used as a tool of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation that facilitates an alternative point of entry into a genealogy of particular cinematic modes such as folk horror.

In the long list of 31 films pitched to the festival team, I also proposed Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s Kandisha(2020) and Jérôme Cohen-Olivar’s Kandisha (2008). Both films sit harmoniously with the canonising accounts of folk horror, as well as the category of “postcolonial horror.” However, they differ in terms of what Rosalind Galt considers as their “modes of transnationalism” to evoke Aïcha Kandisha as a postcolonial spirit: “if the Moroccan film [2008] is transnational primarily in its address and its projection of Morocco to Euro-American audiences, the French Kandisha [2020] is transnational in its narrative of a colonial spirit that haunts postcolonial spaces [i.e. the French banlieue].”[47] As the mid-brow postcolonial aesthetic of Cohen-Olivar’s film came across too obscure to the programming team and their vision of “edginess” for the IIFF’s Mined Zone section, the authorial brand of Maury and Bustillo (as important figures of the New French Extremity known with their films Inside /À l’intérieur (2007) and Livid/Livide (2011)) made the French Kandisha a more palatable (thus “marketable”) option for the festival’s programming team.

Complying with the programming team’s preferences to minimise the presence of the global canon of cult horror in Mined Zone, I agreed on including the Indonesian film Mystics in Bali aka Leák (1981) as the only “cult” entry in the selection. In resonance with what Izharuddin defines as “transnational weird,”[48] Tjut Djalil’s film uses the female vampire leák/penanggalan/krasue from Southeast Asian folklore to subvert the aesthetic paradigms of horror in the Western film-historical canon. The selection of Leák also facilitated the inclusion of a mini programme of shorts from Amanda Nell Eu and Riar Rizaldi, which addresses contemporary responses to the uses of folklore in Southeast Asian cinemas.[49]

The British-Malaysian artist Amanda Nell Eu’s shorts Vinegar Baths (2018) and It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (2017) perform a critique of contemporary gender politics in Southeast Asia by appropriating the cinematic legacy of the folkloric creatures pontianak and penanggalan, and repurposing queer potentials of contemporary “aswang transmedia” in the wider Southeast Asia where folklore generates local camp sensibilities.[50] While Eu’s practice may be considered to fall into the category of feminist “art horror,” Riar Rizaldi’s essay film Ghost Like Us (2021) critically explores the importance of the folklore-horror nexus in Indonesian cinema by locating it in the post-Suharto national context of cultural politics. “As an attempt to examine the cultural and political implication of rural approach on horror cinema in Indonesia,” Rizaldi states, Ghost Like Us “offers an essayistic approach that investigates the rural-urban dynamic in horror cinema from the New Order regime to the dawn of deconstructed horror genre found in the kino-pravda style Misteri Bondowoso […] and demonstrates a poetic reflection of horror, ideology, the evolution of cinema, and cinematic-thinking in understanding the current landscape of media technology in Indonesia and Asia.”[51] The inclusion of Eu’s and Rizaldi’s shorts in the programme also works as a critical supplement to the Turkey-based audiences’ exposure to contemporary Southeast Asian horror via Netflix Türkiye, e.g. Sittisiri Mongkolsiri’s Inhuman Kiss (2019), Glen Goei and Gavin Yap’s Revenge of the Pontianak (2019), and Rizal Mantovani’s Kuntilanak (2018).

The selection’s engagement with art film was not limited to the works of Eu and Rizaldi. The programme included the Austrian production Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse (2017), a low-budget experimental “witch film” that creates an abstraction of witchcraft through the surrealist use of cinematography and the Alpine landscape. While the director Lukas Feigelfeld’s engagement with folklore and witchcraft is stylistically innovative, the film also demonstrates a transnational affinity with the “witch”-themed independent “art horror” movies such as Eggers’ The Witch (2015).

Finally, the most “straightforward” cases for selection – considering the festival team’s programming preferences shaped by the dominant regimes of palatability and marketability in the global art-house film festival circuit – were Arsalan Amiri’s Zalava (2021) and Anand Gandhi and Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad (2018). Set in 1978, a year before the Islamic Revolution, Zalava “uses the Jinn figure to question [its characters’] sense of reality, but also to speak to the contextual politics of a post-war Iran.”[52] Anvari’s film seeks to continue the rising international popularity of Iranian horror (e.g. Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow [2016]) in its ambivalent engagement with horror and folklore. This new trend in “accented” Iranian horror is shaped by films that are “not conventional horror films” but rather taking various forms such as “a tongue-in-cheek horror-western-coming-of-age story … [or] a pseudo-realist war-horror and social film.”[53]  In Tumbbad, however, we encounter a transnational aesthetic of horror nuanced with local folklore. Considering Tumbbad as an example of “new Indian folk horror films,” Iain Smith argues that the film is “not particularly distinct from the conventions of the folk horror genre as a whole – indeed, on a formal level, Tumbbad is closer to other contemporary folk horror films like The Witch (2015) and The Wailing (2016) than the earlier Bollywood ‘masala’ horror from directors like the Ramsay Brothers.”[54] “Yet at the level of content,” Smith continues, “there is a deliberate emphasis upon explicitly local traditions and folklore, and it is precisely this cultural specificity at the level of content and not at the level of form that I argue helps explain the much overdue shift in the international perception of Indian horror cinema.”[55]

Informed by IIFF’s arthouse “brand” (and Mined Zone’s ambitious aim to programme experimental, innovative, “edgy” filmmaking practices from the global milieu of contemporary art-house cinema) and its curatorial protocols (of “cultural elevation” to meet IIFF’s arthouse programming) agreed at the start of this project, the final selection of films in Mined Zone: Folk Horror included a significant number of films that resonated with “art horror,” or what David Church conceptualises as “post-horror.”[56] Separating horror from its affiliations with genre cinema through its “lessened focus on the terror-inducing monster as clearly defined narrative locus, and its alternate focus on generating ambient states of dreadful unease,”[57] post-horror, Church argues, “merge[s] art-cinema style with decentered genre tropes, privileging lingering dread over audiovisual shocks and monstrous disgust.”[58] What Church presents in his study as the “provisional corpus of post-horror cinema”[59] is an attempt to produce a “parallel canon” (to use Jovčić-Sas’s terminology) that is predominantly shaped by contemporary independent productions from American, Australian, and British cinemas. While Church’s “parallel canon” of “post-horror” captures a significant number of “folk horror” films (e.g. The Witch, Midsommar, Hagazussa, and Relic [James 2020]), it also includes examples without any direct affiliations with folklore (e.g. Personal Shopper [Assayas 2016], mother! [Aronofsky 2017], Raw, and Us). What interest me here, however, is the productive intersections between the contemporary revival of “folk horror” as mode, and Church’s “post-horror” and its focus on “ambience,” both of which obscure horror’s associations with genre cinema.

Although a significant number of films included in Mined Zone: Folk Horror can be considered to resonate with “post-horror” as category, the selection – in its entirety – de-centres Church’s predominantly Anglo-American corpus. The Mined Zone: Folk Horror programme contains:

• non-Anglophone post-horror films experimenting with filmic medium, e.g. stop-motion animation (The Wolf House) and video art (Eu’s shorts Vinegar Baths and It’s Easier to Raise Cattle),
• post-horror films appropriating the globally palatable arthouse film aesthetics (Zalava, Hagazussa, Saloum, and The Feast), and
• non-Anglophone post-horror films claiming artistic and critical “elevation” of cinema, through minoritarian filmmaking practices, that de-centre the mainstream cultural production of their affiliated national film industries (Juju Stories Nollywood, Tumbbad vs. Bollywood, and Ich-chi vs. Moscow-centred Russian cinemas).

However, the anti-canonising curatorial framework of Mined Zone: Folk Horror also sought to interrupt Church’s “parallel canonisation” of “post-horror,” by including

• middlebrow horror crossovers (e.g. Kandisha (2020) and Post Mortem [Bergendy 2020]),
• transnational cult horror (e.g. Mystics in Bali),
• documentary-horror crossover-hybrids (e.g. Elsewhere, Ghost Like Us), and
• auteur-driven non-Anglophone horror that had escaped the global cinematic canons of both auteur cinema and horror cinema (e.g. Kim Ki-young’s Io Island).

Mined Zone was not curated in isolation from other sectoral and discursive forces, including those of festival sponsorship and film journalism. The next section will focus on the ways in which promotional texts and curatorial paratexts contributed to the project’s implementation of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation.

Curatorial Paratexts, Commercial Intertextuality: Collaborating with MUBI Türkiye and Altyazı

My collaboration with MUBI and Altyazı facilitated a commercial intertextuality that enabled the project’s curatorial input to go beyond the film theatre and the festival apparatus. This section will discuss the ways in which the project navigated the curatorial paratexts (i.e. MUBI’s commercial discourse and Altyazı’s journalistic mode of film criticism) and managed to produce a transmedia convergence of academic practice through the curatorial.

Like many international film festivals, IIFF had to consider producing their 2020 and 2021 programme in collaboration with on-demand streaming platforms during the coronavirus pandemic. While IIFF’s 2022 programme celebrated the return to film theatres, the festival team also pursued the opportunities of sponsorship and collaboration with local and global streamers to hybridize the access to the programme. MUBI Türkiye acted as one of the festival’s primary sponsors; however, the MUBI team also proposed to act as a project partner of Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics by (i) collaborating with myself as Mined Zone: Folk Horror’s curator, and sponsoring the screenings, and (ii) extending the folk horror screenings to a multi-platform context.

As part of our collaboration, the MUBI Türkiye team released The Wolf House on their platform (following the end of the IIFF programme) while also promoting the “folk horror”-affiliated films already available for streaming in their own existing programme: Onibaba (1964), Kuroneko (1968), René Laloux’s counter-culture sci-fi classic Fantastic Planet (1973), Mohammad Reza Aslani’s recently restored pre-revolution Iranian film Chess of the Wind (1976), Nagisa Oshima’s kaidan film Empire of Passion (1978), the internationally acclaimed South Korean horror film The Wailing (2016), Brazilian werewolf film Good Manners (2017), Border (2018), Bacurau (2019), and Lamb (2021). In line with the project’s framing of folk horror through its critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation, these additional titles MUBI Türkiye promoted – under the marker of “folk horror” – did not only enhance Mined Zone’s reach to wider audiences but also further diversify Mined Zone’s curated selection by featuring relevant examples from various non-Anglophone contexts including Japan, Scandinavia, South America, and South Korea.

Released as an addition to the IIFF’s promo material in early April (Fig. 2), the promotional video MUBI Türkiye published on its official social media accounts (Fig. 3) attempted to highlight its curatorial effort to continue providing its audiences with additional “folk horror” titles. The text used in the promo’s mash-up video says: “Mayınlı Bölgeheyecanına MUBI’de yıl boyu devam [The thrill of Mined Zone continues on MUBI all year round]” (Fig. 3).[60]While the promo video uses images from the films Lamb, Good Manners, The Wailing, Empire of Passion, andFantastic Planet to relay the diverse range of films MUBI offered in support of Mined Zone, it also uses shots from other recent MUBI Türkiye releases that were not relevant to folk horror, i.e. Julia Ducournau’s 2021 Palme D’Or winner body-horror Titane (2021), Chris Marker’s La Jeteé (1962), and Edward D. Wood Jr.’s sci-fi horror Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

MUBI’s promo video quotes Plan 9’s character Chiswell (“you are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable… that is why you are here”) and decontextualises it to serve a commercial function in highlighting folk horror’s affinities with “the unknown,” “the mysterious,” and “the unexplainable.” While this can be seen as an example of how the “aporetic” genre-markers are manipulated for commercial interests, the promo’s references to Titane and La Jeteé are considerably far-fetched: although both film-texts may be considered to imply modes of experimentation with genre and canon, they do not engage with folklore-as-mode in any form or sense at all. This demonstrates how MUBI’s “curation model of video on-demand” locates the curatorial within its market-driven “efforts to curate an audience by building brand awareness, recommendation credibility and brand loyalty,” rather than attending to the nuances of the themed “indie” and/or “art-house” content it releases, promotes, and claims to “curate” through what Frey considers as a “rhetorical commitment to curation over algorithms.”[61]

“A critical transnationalism,” Higbee and Lim assert, “should also extend to our own critical practice as film scholars who enjoy the privilege of being located within an anglophone academia: one that wields its hegemonic language of English while pronouncing on transnational films that are often polyphonic in their linguistic use and that contain characters whose plight is precisely a result of the lack of capital of all forms (economic, cultural, symbolic).”[62] The scholars ask: “Can transnational film studies be truly transnational if it only speaks in English and engages with English-language scholarship?” Only through a critical mode of transnationalism can film studies “emerge as a vital field for a transnational, trans-lingual dialogue on cinema.”[63] Significantly informed by these questions, my collaboration with the Turkey-based film magazine Altyazı aimed to mobilise a “trans-lingual dialogue” on the folk horror revival. Acting as the guest editor for the magazine’s April 2022 issue, I have produced a themed, open-access dossier that included fifteen pieces authored by the project’s participants. Only two of these pieces were authored in Turkish, while thirteen of them were written in English and then translated into Turkish.

 Altyazı has been Turkey’s leading film magazine since 2001, participating in cinephile culture and promoting independent filmmaking. The magazine was evolved into a non-profit NGO (namely, Altyazı Cinema Association), advocating freedom of expression and democratic values in the field of cinema. Altyazı’s mission in the contemporary media landscape in Turkey is two-fold: (i) to offer original and critical content on national and international film culture, and, on a broader level, (ii) to actively cooperate with filmmakers, academics, festivals, and other civil society organisations to strengthen their critical voices for a more democratic cultural scene. The magazine’s operations across the intersections between academia, activism, journalism, and the national film sector provided a crucial input into the project. The dossier’s alignment with Altyazı’s journalistic register of scholarship (with academic affinities) does not only make the project (and its academic participants’ contributions) accessible to non-academic Turkish-speaking film enthusiasts but also propose film journalism as a crucial mode of what Higbee and Lee propose as “trans-lingual” transnationalism. As any browser’s in-built translation application could facilitate a considerably effective relay of the Turkish-language content of the dossier to non-Turkish-speaking readers, this “journalistic” output of the project aimed to produce a “trans-lingual” paratext for Mined Zone: Folk Horror, that encourages a two-way translation and exchange

The dossier does not only promote a significant number of the films selected for IIFF’s Mined Zone programme (Juju Stories, Tumbbad, Zalava, Io Island, Kandisha, The Wolf House, The Feast, Leák, Vinegar Baths, and It’s Easier to Raise Cattle), but also host reviews of a number of films included in MUBI Türkiye’s selection of folk horror (Kuroneko, Onibaba, Lamb, Border, Bacurau, and Chess of the Wind).[64] The dossier’s inclusion of Gary Needham’s review of the Japanese kaidan films (e.g. Kuroneko and Black Cat Mansion),[65] Bliss Cua Lim’s discussion of “cosmopolitan animism”[66] in the anime-influenced television series from the Philippines, Trese (BASE 2021), and Shakuntala Banaji’s comparative analysis of Bacurau and Karnan under the rubric of “postcolonial horror”[67]expanded the project’s framework to contexts that neither Mined Zone nor the MUBI programme were able to capture.

In conclusion, the project’s collaboration with MUBI and Altyazı facilitated a commercial intertextuality that enabled the project’s curatorial input to go beyond the film theatre and the festival apparatus. In dialogue with the curatorial paratexts (i.e. MUBI’s commercial discourse and Altyazı’s journalistic mode of film criticism), the project managed to produce a transmedia convergence of academic practice through the curatorial.

In Place of Conclusion

If the curatorial affordances of film studies get to be our core focus, the dominant paradigms of the field should be reimagined through practice-based (and/or practice-led) modes of knowledge production. As long as the forces of the higher education market continue to impose their own curatorial agendas upon teaching and research practices, these demands need to be reciprocated with our own curatorial propositions to decolonise the curriculum, to rethink the politics of academic citation practices, to de-centre hegemonic canons, to ensure methodological diversity in response to the sectoral demands/mandates of “impact” and “public engagement,” to imagine sustainable film policies, and to re-theorise analytical paradigms in the field. Seeking to identify curatorial affordances of practice-based research when collaborating with cultural and institutional “gatekeepers,” this study on the folk horror revival is intended to act as a point of entry into a wider debate I call for on the currency of curatorial paradigms in film studies. My proposition here should not be taken as an indictment of the field’s predominantly text-based investments in analytical rigour. It is, however, an intervention that proposes a relational curatorial paradigm to produce alternative territories of (practice-based) knowledge production and scholarly rigour in film studies.

---

Notes

[1] Rosalind Galt, Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), p.25.

[2] Ibid., p.38.

[3] Ibid., p.25.

[4] Steven J. Schneider (ed.), Fear without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe (London: FAB Press, 2002); Steven J. Schneider and Tony Williams (eds.), Horror International (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005).

[5] Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (eds.), Korean Horror Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Gary Bettinson and Daniel Martin (eds.), Hong Kong Horror Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); Colette Balmain, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Katinka van Heeren, “Return of the Kyai: Representations of horror, commerce, and censorship in post-Suharto Indonesian Film and Television,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, No. 2 (2007): 211-226.

[6] This project is sponsored by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme during 1/9/2021-30/11/2023.

[7] For the first, British/Anglophone, conceptualisation of “folk horror revival”, see Andy Paciorek, “Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields and Furrows: An Introduction,” in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, edited by Andy Paciorek (Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press / Lulu, 2018): pp. 12-19. This volume is connected to the Folk Horror Revival and Urban Wyrd Project. For the project’s official webpage, see https://folkhorrorrevival.com

 

[8] Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 223-4. Inspired by Munt’s discussion here, which specifically focuses on the ways in which “queer” and “sodomitical sublime” operate through “aporia,” I argue that the aporetic has wider implications with regard to the discursive functions of critical concepts in arts and humanities.

[9] Jean-Paul, Martinon (ed.), The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

[10] Simon Sheikh, “Curating and Research: An Uneasy Alliance,” in Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating, edited by M. V. Hansen, A. F. Henningsen and A. Gregersen (London: Routledge, 2019), p.90.

[11] Ibid., p. 105.

[12] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 369–91.

[13] Stefan Nowotny, “Anti-Canonization,” in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: Mayfly, 2009), p.27.

[14] Ibid., pp. 26-7.

[15] Adrian Martin, “Folk Horror Türünün İçinde ve Dışında [Lamb: In and Out of Folk Horror],” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-folk-horror-turunun-icinde-ve-disinda  (cited from Martin’s original text written in English); see also Adrian Martin, “Film Review: Lamb is stunning and resists folk horror tag,” Screen Hub, online, 15 October (2021): https://www.screenhub.com.au/news/reviews/film-review-lamb-is-stunning-and-resists-folk-horror-tag-1475934/.

[16] See Scovell’s commentary in Kier-La Janisse, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, 2021, my emphasis.

[17] For the discussion of these documentary modes, see Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

[18] Kier-La Janisse, Woodlands Dark.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Iain R. Smith, “Hindistan Folk Horror Sineması ve Tumbbad [Indian Folk Horror and the Crossover Popularity of Tumbbad],” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-hindistan-folk-horror-sinemasi-ve-tumbbad

[21] Iain R. Smith, The Hollywood Meme: The Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

[22] Alexander Jovčić-Sas, Locating Grunow and Oram after celebrating the Bauhaus Centenary: Using parallel canonisation as a curatorial method to re-establish marginalised figures (Nottingham Trent University, UK: Unpublished PhD dissertation, 2024), forthcoming. Supported by AHRC/Midlands4Cities Doctoral Network’s Collaborative Doctoral Awards Scheme, Nottingham Contemporary, and PRS Music Foundation, Jovčić-Sas’s practice-based doctoral research explores, critically, the canonical narratives embedded in the Bauhaus Centenary. In response to the canonical framings of the Bauhaus, Jovčić-Sas reclaims the school’s marginalised figure Gertrud Grunow through his proposition of “parallel canonisation” as curatorial mode. Through Grunow’s work, Jovčić-Sas’s practice proposes an alternative legacy, a “parallel canon,” for electronic music, that extends from Grunow to Daphne Oram, and then to the contemporary electronic music artist/composer Afrodeutsche. This doctoral study made a significant contribution to my thinking of horror cinema, the canon, and the curatorial. Jovčić-Sas’s practice also takes Reilly’s “curatorial activism” as one of its key sources of inspiration. See Maura Reilly, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.

[23] Will Higbee and S. Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Crucial Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas 1, No. 1 (2010): 10.

[24] Ibid., p.18

[25] Ibid., pp.12-13.

[26] Mark Jancovich, “Review of I. Conrich & D. Woods, K. Heffernan, M. Hills, P. Hutchings, R. Worland,” Screen48, No. 2 (2007): 261-2, my emphasis.

[27] Ramon Lobato and Mark David Ryan, “Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9, No. 2 (2011): 188.

[28] Ibid., p.199.

[29] For critical overviews of Turkey’s privately funded arts institutions (and their historical affiliation with “Western”/Eurocentric institutions and practices), including Istanbul Foundation of Culture and Arts (IKSV), which IIFF is part of, see Esra Yıldız, “An Overview of Cultural Literacy in Turkey through Private Contemporary Art Institutions and Independent Arts and Cultural Spaces under the AKP Rule,” Critical Arts 34, No. 5 (2020): 121-138; Evinç Doğan, “City as Spectacle: Festivalization of Culture in Istanbul,” in Young Minds Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by Mensur Akgün and Lenka Pet’ková (Istanbul: Istanbul Kültür University Press, 2011): pp. 69-93; and Sibel Yardımcı, “Festivalising Difference: Privatisation of Culture and Symbolic Inclusion in Istanbul,” EUI Working Paper 2007/35, in Mediterranean Programme Series Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies – RSCAS(Policy Papers PONZANO, 2007).

[30] To see IKSV’s electronic archive of IIFF catalogues (from 1982 until present), see their official webpage: https://film.iksv.org/en/archives/e-catalogues

[31] Ibid.

[32] Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, “Cinema, Ethnicity, and Nation-Building in the Sakha Republic (Russia) and Kazakhstan,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (2022), online,  https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1326; Suyin Haynes and Madeline Roache, “Why the Film Industry is Thriving in the Russian Wilderness,” Times, online, 31 January (2020): https://time.com/longform/film-industry-russia-yakutia/

[33] Johnny Walker, “Doğanın İntikamı [Revenge of Nature: Notes on The Feast],” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-doganin-intikami

[34] Vlad Strukov, “Yaklaşan Felakete Dair [Sakha Horror and the Impending Destruction,” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-yaklasan-felakete-dair

[35] Tega Okiti, “Surreal 16: the filmmaking collective trying to forge a new identity for Nigerian cinema,” British Film Institute, online, 5 September (2018): https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/surreal16-collective-nigerian-arthouse-cinema-nollywood

[36] Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku, “Juju Stories Review: Surreal 16’s Bold and Artistic Exploration of Nigerian Urban Legends,” Afrocritic, online, 1 February (2022): https://www.afrocritik.com/juju-stories-review/

[37] Ebukah Emmanuel Nzeji, “Juju Stories: Nollywood and the Forgotten Art of Motifs in Storytelling,” AKOROKO, online, 26 February (2023): https://akoroko.com/juju-stories-nollywood-motifs/ In a piece commissioned by my British Academy project for the Turkish film magazine Altyazı, the film critic Onaran elaborates on the film’s use of folklore, e.g. the witch as a pre-Christian figure, to confront the corrupt establishment of Christianity in Nigerian society. See Gözde Onaran, “Jujuya Dönüş ve Muhalif Cinema [Return to Juju and Oppositional Cinema],” in Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-jujuya-donus-ve-muhalif-sinema

[38] Phuong Le, “Saloum Review – slick gangster horror in west Africa,” Guardian, online, 6 September (2022): https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/06/saloum-review-slick-gangster-horror-in-wild-west-africa

[39] Steven Scaife, “Review: The Wolf House Is a Trippy Evocation of the Mechanics of Fascism,” Slant, online, 11 May (2020): https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-wolf-house-review/

[40] Ibid.

[41] Juwen Zhang, “Filmic Folklore and Chinese Cultural Identity,” Western Folklore 64, No. 3-4 (2005): p. 267.

[42] Vibeke Bryld, “Elsewhere/Thyland (2021) Press Kit UK,” Final Cut, online, 2021: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5719f1128a65e2cccb5d1a04/t/607c9278413fdc79e8bb8fde/1618776710203/Elsewhere_EPK_CPHDOX_2021.pdf

[43] Chung-kang Kim, “Introduction: Kim Ki-young, The First Global South Korean Auteur,” in The Films of Kim Ki-young, edited by Chung-kang Kim (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 1-14.

[44] Jason Bechervaise, “Rediscovering Kim Ki-young: The Rise of the South Korean Auteur on the Film Festival Circuit,” in The Films of Kim Ki-young, edited by Chung-kang Kim (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 148-56.

[45] Ibid., pp. 146-161.

[46] Colin Marshall, “A Harrowing Journey to an Island of Women, and Into Korea’s Psychological Recesses: Kim Ki-young’s Iodo (1977),” BLARB: Blog Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 June (2019): https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/

[47] Rosalind Galt, “Feminism with swords and hooves: Aïcha Kandisha, transnational cinema, and postcolonial horror,” in Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics, edited by Cüneyt Çakırlar (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), forthcoming.

[48] Alicia Izharuddin, “Batılı Bakışa Bir Uyarı [Mystics in Bali: a warning to the western gaze],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-batili-bakisa-bir-uyari; Alicia Izharuddin, “Folk culture and its global circuits: the transnational weird of Indonesian horror and the crisis of intelligibility,” in Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics, edited by Cüneyt Çakırlar (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), forthcoming.

[49] Within the upper limit of 13 entries the IIFF programming team agreed on for Mined Zone: Folk Horror, I was allowed only one entry for a programme of shorts.

[50] For the queer uses of aswang folklore as camp in the Philippine context, see Bliss Cua Lim, “Queer Aswang Media: Folklore as Camp,” Kritika Kultura 24 (2015): 178-225. For the queer interpretations of the pontianak in contemporary contexts of Malaysian film, literature, and arts, see Rosalind Galt, Alluring Monsters, pp. 18, 23, 33-38, 80-83, 109-121.

[51] For Rizaldi’s film and accompanying statement, see http://rizaldiriar.com/ghostus.html

[52] Zahra Khosroshahi, “Kavanozdaki Cinin Görünmez Tehdidi [Zalava: The Invisible Threat of the Jinn in a Jar],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kavanozdaki-cinin-gorunmez-tehdidi

[53] Zahra Khosroshahi, “Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films,” Frames Cinema Journal 16 (2019). https://framescinemajournal.com/article/vampires-jinn-and-the-magical-in-iranian-horror-films/

[54] Iain R. Smith, “Hindistan Folk Horror Sineması.”

[55] Ibid.

[56] David Church, Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

[57] Ibid., p. 17.

[58] Ibid., p.2.

[59] Ibid., p. 14.

[60] My translation.

[61] Mattias Frey, MUBI and the Curation Model of Video on Demand (Cham: Palgrave, 2021), p. 132, my emphasis.

[62] Will Higbee and S. Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema,” p.18

[63] Ibid., p.19

[64] Most of these pieces were cited in the earlier sections above. For the review on Border in the dossier, see Chris Holmlund, “Sınırlar Arasında [Border Checks and Cultural Crossings: Reception, Marketing, and Gräns],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-sinirlar-arasinda. For an extended version published in English, see Chris Holmlund, “Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) and borders: transnational ties, Nordic roots, Swedish knowledge in critical reception,” Transnational Screens 12, No. 2 (2021): 150-168.

[65] Gary Needham, “Kedi Ruhlar ve İntikam Peşindeki Hayaletler [Feline Spirits and Vengeful Ghosts in the Japanese Horror],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kedi-ruhlar-ve-intikam-pesindeki-hayaletler

[66] Bliss Cua Lim, “Kozmopolit Animizm [Cosmopolitan Animism],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kozmopolit-animizm

[67] Shakuntala Banaji, “Postkolonyal Korku ve Çeperdeki Canavarlar  [Postcolonial horror – monsters and meaning at the margins],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-postkolonyal-korku-ve-ceperlerdeki-canavarlar

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Khosroshahi, Zahra. “Kavanozdaki Cinin Görünmez Tehdidi [Zalava: The Invisible Threat of the Jinn in a Jar]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kavanozdaki-cinin-gorunmez-tehdidi ISSN 1303-426X

Khosroshahi, Zahra. “Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films,” Frames Cinema Journal 16 (2019). https://framescinemajournal.com/article/vampires-jinn-and-the-magical-in-iranian-horror-films/

Kim, Chung-kang. “Introduction: Kim Ki-young, The First Global South Korean Auteur,” in Chung-kang Kim (ed.) The Films of Kim Ki-young (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 1-14.

Le, Phuong. “Saloum Review – slick gangster horror in west Africa,” Guardian, online, 6 September (2022): https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/06/saloum-review-slick-gangster-horror-in-wild-west-africa

Lee, Nikki J.L. and Çakırlar, Cüneyt. “Kim Ki-young İsminde Bir Ada [Kim Ki-young, an island]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kim-ki-young-isminde-bir-ada ISSN 1303-426X

Lim, Bliss Cua. “Kozmopolit Animizm [Cosmopolitan Animism]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kozmopolit-animizm ISSN 1303-426X

Lim, Bliss Cua. “Queer Aswang Media: Folklore as Camp,” Kritika Kultura 24 (2015): 178-225.

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Lobato, Ramon and Ryan, Mark David. “Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9, No. 2 (2011): pp. 188-203. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2011.556944

Marshall, Colin. “A Harrowing Journey to an Island of Women, and Into Korea’s Psychological Recesses: Kim Ki-young’s Iodo (1977),” BLARB: Blog Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 June (2019): https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/

Martin, Adrian. “Folk Horror Türünün İçinde ve Dışında [Lamb: In and Out of Folk Horror]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-folk-horror-turunun-icinde-ve-disinda ISSN 1303-426X

Martin, Adrian. “Film Review: Lamb is stunning and resists folk horror tag,” Screen Hub,  online, 15 October (2021): https://www.screenhub.com.au/news/reviews/film-review-lamb-is-stunning-and-resists-folk-horror-tag-1475934/.

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Smith, Iain R. “Hindistan Folk Horror Sineması ve Tumbbad [Indian Folk Horror and the Crossover Popularity of Tumbbad]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-hindistan-folk-horror-sinemasi-ve-tumbbad ISSN 1303-426X

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Institutions and Independent Arts and Cultural Spaces under the AKP Rule,” Critical Arts 34, No. 5 (2020): pp. 121-138.

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Biography

Cüneyt Çakırlar is Associate Professor of Film and Visual Culture at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His current research practice focuses on sexuality studies, global visual cultures, and transnational horror studies. Çakırlar has taught on queer arts and film theory at University College London (UK), Boğazici University (Turkey), Koç University (Turkey), and Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey). His articles appeared in various international peer-reviewed journals including Critical Arts, Cineaction, [in]Transition, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Paragraph, and Screen. He co-edited a volume about cultures of sexual dissidence in contemporary Turkey, namely Cinsellik Muamması: Türkiye’de Queer Kültür ve Muhalefet (2012), co-authored Mustang: Translating Willful Youth (2022), and co-translated Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993) into Turkish (Pinhan, 2014). Çakırlar has also worked with various arts institutions and curatorial collectives based in Turkey, Germany, USA, and UK. He currently leads a British Academy project on “Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics” (2021-2023).

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2703

 

There were no Godzilla films in either the critics’ or filmmakers’ Sight and Sound polls in 2022.[1] No giant monster movies made the top 250 critics’ choices, nor the top 100 filmmakers’ picks. Even Guillermo del Toro, who once described Gojira (Honda Ishirō, 1954) as ‘deep and affecting’,[2] and directed Pacific Rim (2013), his own take on the giant monster film, didn’t vote for a Godzilla film. The polls include classics of Japanese national cinema, with Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, Ozu Yasujirō, 1953) and Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, Kurosawa Akira, 1954) in the top 20 of both. Not counting co-productions,[3] there are six Japanese films in the top 100 directors’ choices, all directed by Ozu and Kurosawa, and none produced after 1957. The critics’ poll, unsurprisingly since it’s a longer list (250 as opposed to 100), features 13 Japanese films, again not counting co-productions,[4] 8 directed by Ozu and Kurosawa, 2 by Mizoguchi Kenji, and 3 produced by Studio Ghibli. This produces a very limited view of Japanese cinema, in specific national contexts and mostly aligned with conventional auteurist notions of art cinema traditions. Gojira remains perhaps the most impactful Japanese film ever made, spawning a host of imitations, and producing the kaijū eiga as a viable sub-genre at the intersection of horror and science fiction. In an ironic twist, since it was produced by the same studio, Gojira also features some of the same cast as Seven Samurai, iconic star Shimura Takashi, and Nakajima Haruo, a stunt player who was inside the monster suit for most of the Godzilla films in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

This article isn’t arguing for the inclusion of Gojira, or any Godzilla films, in lists such as these. What this paper is going to argue about is the narrow definitions created by such lists. Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi represent a common thread in the consideration of Japanese cinema. As Yomota Inuhiko has argued, the recurring focus on the trio as global representatives of Japanese cinema have been a consequence of the ‘readily fulfilled Orientalist desires’ that have been the subject of Japanese national cinema since the growth of auteurist criticsm in 1950s Europe.[5] Gojira is ‘an antinuclear film with an ecological perspective’ born of the nightmare of the end of the Second World War.[6] It fits comfortably with notions of national cinema, but fails to conform with the auteurist dimensions of the majority of the films on the Sight and Sound list. The critics’ inclusion of three Studio Ghbli films, My Neighbour Totoro (Tonari no Totoro, Miyazaki Hayao, 1988), Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka, Takahata Isao, 1988) and Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Miyazaki Hayao, 2001), represents a widening of the established canon, to include animated films, and each shares superficial similarities with Gojira: the presence of strange creatures (kaijū translates literally as ‘strange beasts’ and shares the 怪 (kai) kanji with the kami-like spirits yōkai) or the direct engagement with post-atomic horror. Nevertheless, they still fit largely with exoticist tropes, especially the Miyazaki films, often posited as alternatives to Hollywood animation. This would place them within common oppositional taste hierarchies, world cinema still often revolving around a Hollywood centre. In addition to this, it’s worth noting that monsters do appear on both lists: Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) features on both critics’ and filmmakers’ lists, and Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) are both on the critics’ lists. Genre cinema is therefore not excluded from such lists, but there is a preference for big budget Hollywood genre films.

            The Sight and Sound list represents a legitimate canon. The list of voters covers a diverse list of filmmakers, academics and critics from around the world. It is inclusive, and the critics’ list in particular was lauded for voting Chantal Ackerman’s avant-garde feminist epic Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) the greatest film of all time. Yet, the list maintains a preference for a particular kind of cinema, generally auteur-led art or arthouse cinema. As a self-proclaimed poll of ‘The Greatest Films of all Time’ it makes clear distinctions in terms of quality and represents a defined taste culture.[7] Some responses to the poll focused on what were seen as niche successes. An All the Anime blog celebrated the poll’s promotion of anime, and scraped the raw votes to construct a list of ‘the Best Anime Films of all Time’, highlighting filmmakers whose work was voted for, but not within the 250, including Kon Satoshi, Otomo Katsuhiro and Anno Hideaki. This piece celebrated ‘a world where we only valued the opinions of those with notable taste and distinction (i.e. the 8% of critics and 5% of directors who included an anime on their top 10)’.[8] The sub-Reddit r/Letterboxd conducted their own poll, and published a list that overlapped strongly with the Sight and Sound one, but arguably more conservative: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) beat Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) to the top spot. But there were also more surprising inclusions: Obayashi Nobuhiko’s House (Hausu, 1977) was just outside the top 50, and Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Konsinski, 2022) was ranked higher (203) than Ozu’s Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) (215). Still, no Godzilla. Such lists speak to the curation and cultivation of canons by a range of gatekeepers, filmmakers, professional and validated critics and fans.

The development of alternative and oppositional lists is central to the discussion of cinema. But, what of the films deemed too alternative to fit into such validated canons? How do we account for how fans curate genres or forms through lists and collecting that share and promote such disreputable experiences? This article will explore how kaijūfan communities play a key role in defining the ‘disreputable’ kaijū film. Due to its fragmentation outside official distribution channels, fans play a key role in curating a kaijū canon. Adopting a conventional Fan Studies approach to netnography,[9] combined with a ‘platform studies approach’,[10] this article investigates the labour of kaijū fans on Letterboxd, along with several wikis. Letterboxd is a quasi-social media platform that allows users to build lists and communicate with other film fans, share recommendations and review films. It is an open platform that allows sharing, rating and commenting, and thus forms the bulk of the exploration here.

Letterboxd lists of kaijū films can cover anything from the ‘classics’, Tōhō’s Godzilla films and other Japanese kaijū eiga, to collections of over 2000 works featuring giant monsters of every kind, covering everything from major studio movies to fan films. Rumours circulate among fans of lost classics, such as Tokyo 1960 (Teodorico C. Santos, 1960), a Filipino version of Gojira, while digitised VHS rips of obscure Taiwanese films like War God (Zhànshén, Chan Hung-man, 1974) are shared online. They perform the labour of cultivating a global kaijū film. They fit with ways that Lucia Nagib discusses world cinema: it ‘is not a discipline, but a method, a way of cutting across film history according to waves of relevant films and movements, thus creating flexible geographies’.[11] Kaijū fans are highly attentive to geographies and politics, especially given the origins of the genre, but their collecting and curating can draw attention to complex dynamics of national and transnational boundaries.

The kaijū canon

Canon formation can be an ongoing process of collecting, sharing and validation that can completely disregard notions of quality. The kaijū eiga has long had a noted place in cult film canons. It is considered a quintessentially paracinematic experience,[12] and has a privileged place within bad film canons.[13] However, since kaijū films have often fallen outside conventional mainstream distribution, in exploitation and low-budget cycles, there is often a fragmented picture of this horror/sci-fi sub-genre. The films can often fall into the cracks between Ramon Lobato’s distinctions of formal and informal distribution, and ‘shadow film economies’.[14]  

Fans, therefore, play a key role in collecting and sharing the kaijū canon. The briefest online search can easily find sites in which kaijū films and examples of kaijū are shared by fans, as a means of genrifying.[15] Two wikis, ‘Gojipedia’ and ‘Wikizilla’, both help collect examples of the kaijū film from around the globe as a means of sharing and discussing giant monster movies. The industrial roots of the kaijū film range back to the 1920s and 1930s and the production of very early examples of dinosaur and giant ape films, principally Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper, 1933). Gojira emerges from producer Tanaka Tomoyuki’s need for an idea to replace a production that had collapsed. King Kong’s popular global release to mark its twentieth anniversary and the new American film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953) provided the inspiration for new type of big monster movie, different from that of the atomic-era movies being produced by American studios at the time, rooted in the atomic nightmares of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.[16] By the late 1950s, Japanese critics were discussing the kaijū eiga alongside kaiki eiga (strange stories) as a form of the horror film, but they soon became passeas the films became more childish and horror more fashionable through foreign imports.[17] Kaijū wikis echo the transnational roots of the genre. On the surface, they are devoted to Japanese kaijū films, but collect and reference monsters from around the world. This ranges from the monsters from Japanese studios, Tōhō’s universe of monsters, and those from rival studio Daiei’s Gamera movies. But they sit comfortably alongside Kong and its sequels, the more recent Legendary series of Godzilla and Kong films, as well as del Toro’s Pacific Rim.

What’s immediately apparent in kaijū fans’ canonisation of their object of fandom is how flexible they appear in their approach toward national criteria. The term kaijū is applied to films from any country, from Japan, Taiwan, Denmark, Britain, as well as the US. This sits relatively comfortably with the ways in which Bâ & Higbee define de-westernization in their collection, De-Westernizing Film Studies. As they describe the concept, de-westernization: ‘is (and embraces) the reality of how economically and culturally, films, filmmakers and our analyses, function across national and/or cultural borders and boundaries in the current phase of globalization. This functioning takes place in a way that (paradoxically) challenges the hegemony of the West at the same time as it appears to reinforce it’.[18] The paradox of a form that adopts a Japanese term for its name but that is also a product of mid-twentieth century post-war occupation and globalisation sees fans engage with tropes of nation in their conceptualisation of the kaijū film. The canon does not subscribe to a particular frame of reference to national cinemas or cultural standards of filmmaking (the neocolonial reference to Hollywood as the aspirational pinnacle of standards). However, it paradoxically adopts terminology that periodises the kaijū film through Japanese imperial periods. ‘Gojipedia’ utilises a timeline of Japanese Emperors to define periods of production. Hirohito’s Shōwa reign from 1926 to 1989 is used to classify films up until around 1980, encompassing the monster boom of the 1960s up until around Gamera: Super Monster (Uchū Kaijū Gamera, Yuasa Noriaki, 1980). Heisei, the period of Akihito’s reign, covers all films between 1984 and 1999, despite the reign lasting till the emperor’s abdication in 2019. Millennium describes films made around the turn of the century when Tōhō took a break from producing Godzilla movies to allow for the 1998 Hollywood version directed by Ronald Emmerich. Naruhito’s reign is known as Reiwa, and this term covers kaijū films produced since 2016 – following Shin Gojira (Anno Hideaki & Higuchi Shinji) – unless they form part of the Legendary Monsterverse. The flexible periodisation of ‘Gojipedia’ means that Japanese terms are applied to a range of non-Japanese films, including British film Konga (John Lemont, 1961), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Zarkorr! The Invader (Michael Deak and Aaron Osborne, 1996), a low budget straight-to-video production.

This online fan canonisation represents a form of ‘narractivity’, Paul Booth’s term for the ways in which web commons models of collaborative fandom produce databases of knowledge.[19] Canon building is a form of databasing that produces an object, in this case a quasi-genre with a core set of terminology. That terminology is not solely a product of online narractivity, since the terms used to describe the kaijū film are well established pre-internet, in a range of publications and fanzines, such as G-FAN (1993-present), The Monster Times (1972-1976), Japanese Giants (1974-2004), as well as the long-running Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-2019). But these canons now sit online in various forms, with ‘Wikizilla’ and ‘Gojipedia’ just two of those forms. While there is a primary focus on Japanese monsters and movies (this might be described as a purist approach, to which I’ll return later), the canon that develops is one that is largely transnational. It subscribes to Bâ & Higbee’s paradox, at once a product of a form of globalisation while simultaneously adopting a centre away from Hollywood. We can view fans canon building as de-Westernization,

an ongoing process that enables debate and negotiation […] defined more in terms of a shared attitude toward the need for a more diverse approach to [..] film history […] than a given geographical location[…] In this context, […] de-Westernizing also becomes the act (through theory and practice) of exposing, challenging, and thus repositioning the West’s dominance (real and imagined) as a conceptual “force,” representational norm, epistemological center, and ontological “fact”.[20]

This returns us to the initial focus of the article, most established greatest films canons retain a focus on the West as centre and fact. Kaijū fan processes of canonisation posit a centre away from Hollywood. While such a position does rely upon a colonial history and neocolonial relationship, the hierarchisation of nation is problematised by many kaijū fans.

The purist kaijū canon

Kevin Derendorf’s book Kaijū for Hipsters: 101 “Alternative” Giant Monster Movies is a self-published reference tome of kaijū movies, from major movies to X-rated examples such as Cleavagefield (Jim Wynorski, 2009), King Dong(Yancey Hendrieth, 1984) or Chinkozilla (Chin Kojira, Nakamura Rino, 2016). Derendorf acknowledges what we might refer to as a ‘cultural roots’[21]  argument about the origins of kaijū films. As he notes, there are fans who would see American films like Pacific Rim or Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2009) disqualified. Derendorf classifies kaijū films based on their proximity to the tradition established by Gojira and the special effects work of Tsuburaya Eiji. They ‘build on the Japanese tradition’ more than films that might have the word kaijū in their translated titles, but ultimately don’t reflect Tsuburaya’s influence, such as The Monster from Green Hell,[22] a 1957 B-picture released in Japan as Konchū kaijū no shūrai, literally Invasion of Insect Monsters.

In a post on his blog, Maser Patrol, Derendorf also reflects on the nature of the term kaijū and its national specificity. He suggests that foreign kaijū could be reclassified: ‘utilizing the kanji that already exists for foreignness (外), and shortening those “gaikoku kaiju” down to just “gai-jū”, like the slang term “gaijin” for foreign people’.[23]As we consider the constitution of such canons, Derendorf here is attempting, in two different fashions, to determine what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ through notions of national specificity. This is notable as Derendorf is a high profile kaijūfan, someone that Matt Hills would determine to be a subcultural celebrity: as ‘fan culture sustains its own specific network of subcultural celebrities’.[24] Such fans, Hills argues, are ‘working at the level of secondary textuality’.[25]Respected kaijū fans like Derendorf, along with SpaceHunterX, Steve Ryfle, August Ragone, JD Lees, play a different role in defining the kaijū canon to that of the mostly anonymous fans whose narractivity contributes to the curation of the kaijū film. This could be in collecting and showcasing different versions of films,[26] determining the parameters of what constitutes a kaijū in the first place,[27] or, importantly, denouncing appropriations of the kaijū film by Hollywood.[28] This final point, positioning texts outside the canon of the kaijū film, often because they whitewash the Japanese films’ origins,[29] ultimately shape what is ‘out’, not just determining what is ‘in’.

As Derek Kompare argues in his chapter, “Fan curators and the gateways into fandom”, such activity is at the heart of the activity of fans. Fans curate the objects of their fandom, creating unofficial canons in a variety of ways: ‘The most basic form of curation is suggested canon: simply suggesting, loaning, copying, or gifting additional material to interested fans. This canon is likely not “official,” but is based instead on the curator’s perceptions of fannish texts, and their relationship to their fandom.’[30] The examples above all revolve around aspects of suggested canon, via the kaijū fan’s ‘secondary textuality’. Ultimately, Kompare sees such curation as contributing to Encyclopedic media, which he describes as ‘the most common form of curated fan media, the perspectives that fans research, write, discuss, and argue about’.[31] Polls like the Sight & Sound list are also examples of encyclopedic media, where ‘elite fans’, as Matt Hills might refer to them,[32] the scholars or celebrity fans whose reputations ‘combine the symbolic and discursive power of subcultural celebrity status with industry power’, namely the filmmakers and critics whose fandom overlaps with their ‘media-professionalism’.[33] Such lists therefore represent ‘secondary textuality’ in relation to a fan’s curation of the genre, from whatever perspective that is manifest. As Philipp Dominick Keidl has argued in response to the growth of fan-run museums, such curation relies upon ‘subcultural networks and intermediaries that represent a crucial space for community building’.[34]

To explore how alternative lists can be defined in relation to the genre-building function of such lists and kaijūfandom, this study has looked at Letterboxd as way of determining how oppositional lists can be understood. Letterboxd features over 250 lists that match the tag kaijū.[35] Associated terms deliver variable numbers of lists: daikaijū (26), tokusatsu (特撮, “special filming”, the term used mostly to refer to Henshin [transforming series like Ultraman [1966-present]) (188), Godzilla (250+), Gamera (250+), Toho kaijū (64), Daiei kaijū (2), American kaijū (15), King Kong (250+), strange beasts (5), Japanese kaijū (14, including several that highlight the non-inclusion of Godzilla or that are just non-kaijū Japanese films). This spread of lists is not terribly revealing, although we might argue that as terms become more niche, such as daikaijū, or more refined in their relationship with national cinemas, such as identifying Japanese studios or specific national cinemas, the lists become less numerous. In terms of canon building impulses though, several lists seem to stand out. For this purpose, I want to look at several lists, all of which matched a search for the term kaijū and have more than 10 likes, and preferably comments, as they contribute to an ongoing discussion amongst viewers about the composition and understanding of the kaijū film. This represents 8 lists, each of which demonstrate flexible demonstrations of their understanding of what constitutes a kaijū and varying degrees of deference toward national origins. Such lists make little concession to notions of quality or, in some cases, media, shifting across various forms.

All the lists represent Kompare’s ideas of how fans manufacture suggested canon, some more flexibly than others. The first list I want to discuss is simply entitled ‘Kaiju’, by William Carpenter, and is described as ‘The chronology of the kaiju, starting with the true start of King Kong.’ The list is tagged ‘kaiju’, ‘king kong’, ‘godzilla’, and curiously, ‘foreign’ and ‘black and white’ (perhaps in reference to Gojira). This list collects 76 films, only 14 of which are not Japanese. It includes 31 of the 32 Tōhō Godzilla films (not including Shin Godzilla), alongside a handful of other Tōhō kaijū films, such as Mothra (Mosura, Honda Ishirō, 1961), Varan the Unbelievable (Daikaijū Baran, Honda Ishirō, 1958) and Frankenstein Conquers the Earth (Furankenshutain tai Chitei Kaijū Baragon, Honda Ishirō, 1965). It also features all 12 of Daiei/Kadokawa’s Gamera films and the mid-1960s Daimajin trilogy. The relatively small number of non-Japanese kaijū films include fairly predictable examples, such as The Lost World, King Kong, its sequels and 1976 remake, The Beast from 20,00 Fathoms and some of the Legendary series (the list was last updated in 2020, so this does not include Godzilla vs. Kong). North Korean film Pulgasari (Shin Sang-ok, 1985) and British Gorgo(Eugène Lourié, 1961) are also included. This list represents perhaps the best evocation of the tradition that Derendorf alluded to, with a lineage of special effects practitioners from Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen to Tsuburaya (who was heavily influenced by King Kong, to the point where the Go- in Gojira is adopted from gorilla). There is a clear continuity communicated through this list. What is perhaps most of interest is what is missing from the list: Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong (2005) and Emmerich’s reviled American version of Godzilla (1998). The latter is so detested by Godzilla fans that the monster design from the film is conventionally referred to as GINO (Godzilla-in-name-only). This therefore represents something of a ‘purist’ canon of kaijū movies, aligned with established narratives around the development of the form, its core influences and the main studios responsible for its key works. As many commentaries about the kaijū film have done,[36] this tends to essentialise the ‘Japaneseness’ of the kaijū movie, even if it alludes to the transnational background to its formation.[37]

Other kaijū Letterboxd lists also follow the pattern of highlighting the core Japaneseness of the giant monster film. ‘Kaiju!’, a list by MadCetologist, an active user with 75 lists, has just 45 films. Around half are Godzilla films, with a smattering of Tōhō films, including Rodan (Sora no Daikaijū Radon, Honda Ishirō, 1956) and Space Amoeba(Gezora Ganime Kamēba Kessen! Nankai no Daikaijū, Honda Ishirō, 1970), but also a few American films, including three Legendary MonsterVerse films, Colossal (Nacho Vigalondo, 2016), an independent film in which a kaijūattacking Seoul is controlled by a young woman experiencing mental illness exacerbated by the toxic masculinity around her, and The Amazing Colossal Man (Bert I. Gordon, 1957). Emmerich’s Godzilla is included, but receives the lowest rating of all from MadCetologist. The function of Letterboxd to sort lists by individual users’ and average ratings emphasises a further function of suggested canon, not simply the inclusion of films within a canon, but rankings and ordering that recommend and suggest orders in which films should be watched or the best pathways into that canon. Lists like this one and the ‘Kaiju’ list, while they are aligned with the conventional narratives around the origins and essentialism of the kaijū movie, are much less niche in the curation of obscure films. They are generally bound by films that are readily commercially available (especially in the US), whereas other lists, which take a less purist approach to narratives of nation or notions of ‘quality’ rely much more on fan labour for their objects.

Every kaijū film ever made

There are a few kaijū Letterboxd lists that promise an exhaustive curation of giant monster movies: the Raccoon Archives’ list ‘Kaijū: Every Kaijū Movie ever made’, includes 366 texts, collecting tokusatsu films and TV shows; ‘Strange Beasts: A Comprehensive List of Creature Features and Genre Films Starring Kaijū, Daikaijū, Dinosaurs, and Giant Monsters’, by Stephen Bush, is an ongoing list of 1421 texts dating back to 1905 with all sorts of giant monsters; while ‘The Complete Kaiju/Tokusatsu Guide 1921 – Present (Refined)’, a list of ‘kaiju/ kaiju adjacent films and tokusatsu films’, by Trey Sharp, features 2026, with dozens more listed that are not featured on Letterboxd. Such lists disregard more essentialist narratives around the national origins of the kaijū, collecting films from around the world, with little conscious focus on medium, quality or the popular availability of such films. They reflect the labour of fan sharing, collecting and suggestion. Since many of the films fall outside popular distribution channels, into the shadow economies of cinema, the very existence and discussion of some films is the product of fan discussion, rumour and myth. Since some films are lost, partially lost, or only available in poor quality VHS dubs, complete lists such as these reflect some of the fan mythology shared by sites like Letterboxd, ‘Wikizilla’, ‘Gojipedia’, and the many kaijūpodcasts, such as Kaijū Transmissions, Kaijū Curry House, Monster Island Commentaries, and Podzooky.[38]

            Many commentators have discussed distinctions of fan labour and the ways it contributes to knowledge production in a variety of fashions. Sandra Annett has argued that anime fans are ‘adding to’ conversations that are transcultural in nature.[39] There is no distinct general vision provided by a fandom (understanding fan communities is not a case of ‘adding up’ conversations), but fan work is plural by nature.  Similarly, Jamie Sexton has celebrated the ‘hard work’ of fans whose transnational activity collects and shares knowledge of national texts.[40] Booth’s conception of fandom relies upon socialised knowledge of etiquette, sharing, gifting and re-gifting. Such ‘digi-gratis’ work helps manufacture the ‘narrative database’ accessible to all fans, whether they contribute to that base of knowledge or not,[41] a process Tisha Turk has described as ‘fundamentally asymmetrical’ as not all gifts are reciprocated.[42]  Suzanne Scott has explored how the feminization of fan gift economies functions as ‘a defensive front to impede encroaching industrial factions.’ Producers’ attempts to appropriate those gifts into commercial networks are largely through male gatekeepers: ‘male audiences are more valued and courted… [U]sers […] consume and create in a fanboyish manner by acknowledging some genres of fan production and obscuring others.’[43] This is problematic in this regard, as most kaijū fans are male. Just 5 of the approximately 50 speakers at 2022’s G-FEST convention in Chicago were female, and the majority of elite kaijū fans are male. This appears to be mirrored in the lists under discussion here – the majority of gatekeepers here are male, but not exclusively so. Nevertheless, the type of fan labour being discussed here is of the kind defined by Scott, Turk and Booth, gratis and gifted. The more exhaustive lists mentioned here however do define those creators as elite in relation to the depth of their knowledge, and their labour is of the kind described by Meicheng Sun: they are ‘distinguishing themselves from ordinary audience members and the self-proclaimed fans who do not expend money, time, or energy on their idols’[44] by aiming to curate encyclopedic media that demonstrates engagement with deep knowledge of the kaijū film, far beyond that of the casual viewer, in significantly subcultural ways. Such lists also synthesise knowledge from the ‘narractivity’ of other fans, building on the dispersed communal archives available online.

            ‘The Complete Kaiju/Tokusatsu Guide 1921 – Present (Refined)’ highlights aspects of the ways in which fan curation can aim to develop a broadly inclusive canon of works that collect lost, unknown and diverse work that fall outside conventional distribution and emphasise the subcultural labour of such fan practices. This list is a mind-boggling collection of films, both features and shorts, and TV shows, both extant and rumoured. It features everything from exploitative mockbusters, like Monster vs. Ape (Daniel Lusko, 2021), The Asylum’s Godzilla vs. Kong knockoff, major Hollywood blockbusters (Emmerich’s film is included), anime (Anno Hideaki is very well represented), yōkaifilms, even effects-heavy horror films like House are featured. Several films however are representative of aspects of fan labour that reflect collecting and sharing and ways in which canon building relies on other fan practices, as well as how suggested canon can broaden the horizons of what is typically reflected in more essentialised lists.

 

Tokyo 1960 is one such film. The film appears in most of the most exhaustive lists of kaijū and in a total of 59 lists devoted to kaijū, Godzilla and Japanese horror films. It also appears on lists of lost Filipino films. The film is legend amongst fans after the existence of the Pinoy film was highlighted by a blog devoted to lost Philippine cinema.[45] But, it’s important to note, nobody appears to have seen this film since 1957, and it is ultimately an object of niche fan knowledge. The original post that referenced the film points to the existence of a series of Pinoy films in the 1950s that borrowed tropes from films made in the US and Japan. The poster shows Godzilla, devouring a train in its jaws, while the faces of the film’s stars, Tessie Quintana, Eddie Del Mar and Zaldy Zshornack, look on. Japanese names from the film seem to have been erased, replaced with the Filipino crew. Fan theories speculate that the film is a localisation in the vein of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (Honda and Terry O. Morse, 1956), the American version of Gojira that inserted Raymond Burr into the action as an observer. SpaceHunterX’s video essay on the multiple versions of Gojiraalso ‘compares’ the film with the other alternate versions produced by German and French distributors, both of which remain in circulation due to fan sharing of VHS copies. Hence, the ‘hard work’ of fans here is ‘adding to’ discussions of suggested canon, highlighting subcultural knowledge of lost and mythic works that help define the completist canon of the kaijū film.

War God is another film referenced in similar tones, a little-seen mid-1970s film directed by Chen Hung-Min, who was best known for his martial arts films. This is a Trans-East Asian film, Taiwanese but set in Hong Kong, with special effects by Takano Koichi, a Japanese technician whose work include dozens of Ultraman episodes and the Monkey (Saiyûki) TV show. Koichi Iwabuchi’s notion of ‘Trans-East Asia as Method’ emphasises a vision of the region as a ‘dialogic communicative space in which people across borders strive to connect’.[46] Films like War God are the dialogic potentials of the kaijū film, speaking strongly to cross-border connectivity within these spaces. The story is very particularly Chinese. It centres on a family divided by modernity and tradition. The father is obsessed with carving statues, haunted by the loss of his wife. His son is a scientist, experimenting with bees. There is also a daughter who is a tearaway, riding motorbikes and hanging out with bad boys. The story maps traditional conservative values onto the giant monster action. The father is a representative of traditional cultural values. He is motivated by his obsession to produce the perfect statue of third century General Guan Yu, a deified god from the Three Kingdoms era. As his eyes fade, he tries to open those of the statue of the deity. Aliens then invade. They demand that humanity destroy its nuclear arsenal after an explosion in outer space has disrupted the atmosphere. The old man’s daughter is kidnapped to be their emissary, but she’s such a troublemaker nobody believes her, even when the weather superheats and then suddenly freezes. Eventually, the general returns in giant form, which leads to the monster action. The film seems to riff on ideas shared with two Daiei movies: Warning from Space (Uchūjin Tokyo ni arawaru, Shima Koji, 1956) and Daimajin(Yasuda Kimiyoshi, 1966). It lifts the literal warning from space from the former and a prayer to a statue that becomes a giant monster from the latter. The identification of the film as a kaijū movie (supplanting the language of Japan onto former colonised nations’ filmmaking in the process) relies on levels of knowledge, not just the derivative similarities between other movies, but also the role of Takano as a worker across borders. However, unlike Tokyo 1960, the film remains in circulation, but in a poor condition version shared widely online. The video quality is poor, since it is a dub of a VHS, with blurry images and difficult to read burned in subtitles (figure 1). The existence of the film echoes earlier sharing, the traces of VHS a reflection of the film’s marginal production, but also reminding of earlier forms of fan curation, when ‘curators functioned as “tape hubs”’ in the 1970s and 80s’.[47]

Conclusion: Discovering new canon

 

Like the Sight & Sound list, curated lists of suggested canon have the capacity to enable discovery of new films. They can validate previously unknown media and broaden the understanding of a genre. While the first lists considered in this article were more purist in their devotion to Japanese tokusatsu and kaijū media, the more exhaustive lists encompass wider sets of films, appeal to different taste cultures and suggest a more diverse audience for niche media than perhaps expected from other visions of kaijū fandoms. Alternative canons that aim at completeness, regardless of distinctions of taste, can both help fans discover new works and show off the elite fans’ superiority in curating ‘every kaijū film ever made’, even if that collection might reflect communal effort.

The inclusion of short and fan-produced films represents areas that more conventional lists of cinema tend to overlook. Some of those shorts have been in circulation for a long time and are well known by fans, such as Bambi Meets Godzilla (Marv Newland, 1969). This is a short, under two minutes, animated film. Most of the running time is credits. A young deer grazes happily in a peaceful field. Suddenly, a huge lizard’s foot stamps on it. The William Tell overture is replaced by a slowed discordance from The Beatles’ ‘A Day in a Life’ as the kaijū’s giant foot flattens the fawn. This is a well-known short to many kaijū fans, having played with the cinema and VHS releases of Godzilla 1985(R.J. Kizer, Koji Hashimoto, 1985), New World Cinema’s localised version of Gojira (Hashimoto, 1984). Other inclusions are less well known commercials, such as Minions x Godzilla x Toho Cinema Collaboration Movie (2015), a short sting for Tōhō Cinemas in which some Minions are scared off by Godzilla.

            Other films are less common in the kaijū canon, and reflect different appropriations. Alternative canon building can help share and spotlight films that would ordinarily fall outside other means of canonising media. Stop-motion artist Cressa Maeve Beer’s short Coming Out (2020) is one such film. It begins in media res with Godzilla fighting horned enemy Baragon.[48] Godzilla is distracted by a sad Godzilla Junior, who we see watching Sailor Moon and hear crying on the bed while their parent looks on. The young kaijū asks to speak to Godzilla, and, over tea, explains they don’t feel male but are female (this is captioned with gender symbols). They hug, and we see Godzilla wearing reading glasses and researching on their laptop. We subsequently see the giant monster knitting. It’s revealed to be a trans flag (figure 2). The monsters return to the fight with Baragon (who is patiently waiting with mug and book in hand), Godzilla Junior now with a pink bow in her hair. Beer explained that the story behind the film drew from her own experience of losing her father: ‘He was the one who introduced me to Godzilla when I was little, and then our last conversation ended up being my coming out to him as Transgender’.[49] While the film was shared at the time of its release by Tōhō and Legendary’s official social media accounts, the inclusion of films like Coming Out in fan curated lists helps to draw attention to works that would conventionally sit outside more mainstream interpretations of canon.

            Film lists like the ones that have been discussed throughout this article can perform multiple functions. Like the more widely reported Sight and Sound list, they enable discovery for more general audiences, and draw attention to lesser-known works. The elevation of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to the position of ‘Greatest Film of All Time’ did just that, sparking a range of discussion, even if some of it descended into misogyny. However, the elite voters of that list continued to elevate particular kinds of cinema and taste to the forefront of cinephile culture. The focus remained largely on classic Hollywood and auteur-led art cinema from around the globe, mostly Europe. Distinctions of cultural capital and taste exclude different kinds of cinema experiences and types of media that alternative and fan curated lists draw attention to. Such lists rely upon different subcultural distinctions, drawing upon an archive of fan-curated knowledge and encyclopedic media. They reflect and draw upon the ‘hard work’ of fan labour, sharing and narrating myths of lost films and works that could only be seen on poor quality VHS dubs shared ad infinitum. Ultimately, they perform some of the work of de-Westernization, posting a cinematic centre away from Hollywood and Europe. While this does fit with tropes of Orientialism in some cases, the curation of the kaijū film by its fans creates a genuinely transnational and transcultural space that genrifies the kaijū film. 

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[1] British Film Institute, “The Greatest Films of All Time”, British Film Institute, 1 December 2022, accessed May 2023, https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time.

[2] Criterion Collection, “Guillermo del Toro on Godzilla”, Criterion Collection, 11 July 2013, accessed May 2023, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2830-guillermo-del-toro-on-godzilla.

[3] I’ve discounted two Japanese co-productions, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (1999) and Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001) since they sit in different national traditions.

[4] There are 6 Japanese co-productions on the list, included Yi Yi and La ciénaga, along with films in other national cinema traditions, such as Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) and Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993).

[5] Inuhiko Yomota, What Is Japanese Cinema? A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p. 13.

[6] Ibid, p. 117.

[7] Some responses to the list were not especially surprising. The National Review bemoaned ‘the end of popular cinema’ via a ‘an inarguably political choice, made by radical Marxist feminists’ (Armond White, “Sight & Sound Poll Results: The End of Popular Cinema.” The National Review, 7 December 2022, Accessed May 2023, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/sight-sound-poll-results-the-end-of-popular-cinema/); filmmaker Paul Schrader complained the winner ‘undermined… the poll’s credibility’ and complained of ‘politically correct rejiggering’ and ‘a landmark of distorted woke reappraisal’ (Christian Zilko, “Paul Schrader Slams ‘Jeanne Dielman’ Topping Sight & Sound Poll as ‘Distorted Woke Reappraisal’.”, Indiewire, 3 December 2022, accessed May 2023, https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/paul-schrader-sight-and-sound-poll-too-woke-1234787868/).

[8] Mike Atherton, “Sight & Sound & Anime”, All the Anime, 12 March 2023, accessed May 2023, https://blog.alltheanime.com/sight-sound-anime/.

[9] Abby Waysdorf describes netnography, derived from Robert Kozinets’ work, as ‘one of the backbones of fandom research’. Abby Waysdorf, “Placing Fandom, Studying Fans: Modified Acafandom in Practice”, Transformative Works and Cultures 33 (2020), accessed July 2023, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1739.

[10] Maria Alberto defines a platform studies approach as a form of netnography that investigates interactions between fans online, but accounting for ways in which the online platform operates, such as how Twitter differs from Tumblr in the form interactions take. Maria Alberto, ‘Exploring How Fans Use Platforms: A Platform Studies Approach to Fan Studies Project’, in A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics, eds. Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2022), pp. 239-254.

[11] Lúcia Nagib, “Towards a positive definition of World Cinema”, in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, eds. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London and New York: Wallflower, 2016), p. 35.

[12] See Jeffrey Sconce, “’Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style”, Screen36 (4) (1995): 371-393; Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, Cult Cinema: An Introduction (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

[13] Harry Medved and Michael Medved, The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time (And How They Got That Way) (London: Angus & Robertson, 1979).

[14] Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: British Film Institute, 2012).

[15] Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999).

[16] Steven Rawle, Transnational Kaiju: Exploitation, Globalisation and Cult Monster Movies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

[17] Michael Crandol, “Godzilla vs. Dracula: Hammer Horror Films in Japan”, Cinephile 13 (1) (2019): 18-23.

[18] Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee, “Introduction: de-westernizing film studies”, in De-Westernizing Film Studies, eds. Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 8.

[19] Paul Booth, Digital Fandom 2.0: New Media Studies, 2^nd Ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2017).

[20] Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee, “Introduction: de-westernizing film studies”, p. 3.

[21] Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London and New York: IB Tauris, 2006).

[22] Kevin Derendorf, Kaiju for Hipsters: 101 “Alternative” Giant Monster Movies (No Place: Maser Press, 2018), p. 11.

[23] Maser Patrol, “怪獣 or 外獣? (Kaiju or Gaiju?)”, 8 January 2017, accessed July 2020, https://maserpatrol.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/怪獣-or-外獣-kaiju-or-gaiju/.

[24] Matt Hills, “Not just another powerless elite?: when media fans become subcultural celebrities”, in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, eds. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 115.

[25] Ibid., p. 110.

[26] Wikizilla, “Five Versions of the First Godzilla Movie ｜ MONSTER PLANET.” YouTube. 5 March 2021, accessed August 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1yE5hlu2Dc.

[27] JD Lees, “What is a Kaiju?” G-Fan 78 (2006), 68-72.

[28] Steve Ryfle, “Whitewashing Godzilla”, In These Times, 14 May 2014, accessed September 2021, https://inthesetimes.com/article/whitewashing-godzilla.

[29] William Tsutsui, “For Godzilla and Country”, Foreign Affairs, 28 March 2014, accessed May 2023, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141472/william-m-tsutsui/for-godzilla-and-country.

[30] Derek Kompare, “Fan curators and the gateways into fandom .” In The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, eds. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York: Routledge, 2017), accessed May 2023, https://doi-org.yorksj.idm.oclc.org/10.4324/9781315637518

[31] Ibid.

[32] Matt Hills, Fan Cultures. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

[33] Matt Hills, “Not just another powerless elite?: when media fans become subcultural celebrities”, p. 108.

[34] Philipp Dominik Keidl, “The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage”, Journal of Popular Culture 54 (2021): p. 414.

[35] This is the maximum number of search results possible in the platform’s engine.

[36] Mark Anderson, “Mobilizing Gojira: Mourning Modernity as Monstrosity”, in In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage, eds. by William M. Tsutsui and Michiko Ito (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), pp. 21-40; Michael J. Blouin, Japan and the Cosmopolitan Gothic: Specters of Modernity(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); David Deamer, Deleuze, Japanese Cinema and the Atom Bomb (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Chon Noriega, “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare: When “Them!” Is U.S.”, Cinema Journal 27 (1) (1987): 63-77; Steve Ryfle, Steve, “Whitewashing Godzilla”; Kimmy Yam, “’Godzilla’ was a metaphor for Hiroshima, and Hollywood whitewashed it”, NBCNews, 7 August 2020, accessed August 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/godzilla-was-metaphor-hiroshima-hollywood-whitewashed-it-n1236165; Inuhiko Yomota, “The Menace from the South Seas: Honda Ishirō’s Godzilla (1954)”, in Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, eds. Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 102-111.

[37] Such activity also fits with Hill’s notion of ‘techno-occidentalism’, ‘reading-for-cultural-difference’ in ways that create oppositions between Hollywood and an Orientalised Far East.  Matt Hills, “Ringing the Changes: Cult Distinctions and Cultural Differences in US Fans’ Readings of Japanese Horror Cinema”, in Japanese Horror Cinema, ed. Jay McRoy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 171.

[38] PlayerFM lists nearly 100 kaijū-related podcasts. PlayerFM, “Kaiju Podcasts”, 26 May 2023, accessed May 2023, https://player.fm/podcasts/Kaiju.

[39] Sandra Annett, Anime Fan Communities: Transcultural Flows and Frictions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 206.

[40] Jamie Sexton, “The allure of otherness: transnational cult film fandom and the exoticist assumption”, Transnational Cinemas 8 (1) (2016): p. 16

[41] Paul Booth, Digital Fandom 2.0: New Media Studies, pp. 85-7.

[42] Tisha Turk, “Fan Work: Labor, Worth, and Participation in Fandom’s Gift Economy,” Transformative Works and Cultures 15 (2014), accessed August 2022, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0518.

[43] Suzanne Scott, “Repackaging fan culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models”, Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (2009), accessed August 2022, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0150.

[44] Meicheng Sun, “K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans”, Global Media and China 5 (4) (2020): p. 402.

[45]Simon Santos, “Pinoy Sci-Fi #4: Three ‘Atomic Monster’ Movies in the Fifties”, Video48, 24 May 2008, accessed August 2021, http://video48.blogspot.com/2008/05/pinoy-sci-fi-4-three-atomic-monster.html.

[46] Koichi Iwabuchi, “Trans–East Asia as method”, in Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, eds. Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai and Chris Berry (London: Routldge, 2016), p. 281.

[47] Derek Kompare, “Fan curators and the gateways into fandom”.

[48] Beer’s social media handle is @beeragon.

[49] Christopher Stewardson, “Interview: Cressa Maeve Beer”, ourculture, 17 July 2020, accessed May 2023, https://ourculturemag.com/2020/07/17/interview-cressa-maeve-beer/.

---

About the Author 

Steven Rawle is an associate professor in Media Production at York St John University. He’s the author of Transnational Kaijū: Exploitation, Globalisation and Cult Monster Movies (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Transnational Cinema: An Introduction (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), and co-editor of Transnational Monsters: Reframing Monstrosity and Global Crisis (Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming). He has also regularly written about topics relating to the transnational circulation and production of cult cinema and has published in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Asian Cinema, The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and Film Criticism. He is also one of the investigators on the Screen Industries Growth Network-funded ‘Cinema and Social Justice Filmmaking’ project.

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2704

 

As Len Cella’s Moron Movies (1983) reaches its 40th birthday, a place in any film canon—mainstream or alternative—still eludes it. Rehabilitating the film as a cinematic milestone has become implausible, complicated by the film’s surface similarities to today’s social media filmmaking practices. Reviewers evaluate Cella’s film as if it were a series of TikTok posts. They miss ample evidence that it should be considered as something more: an example of a parallel mode of cinema, exploring new territories pioneered by the video artists of the early 1980s.

A close study of the film, and its sibling More Moron Movies (1985), reveals that Cella’s work emerges from visual arts practice rather than moviemaking conventions. His art-informed approach, channelled through his one-person, do-it-yourself “amateur” filmmaking practice, is misunderstood by present-day viewers. A film that humbly made a huge cultural splash in its day is thus dismissed in our present moment, as if its only value is in its role as a precursor to social media videos. The result is a diminishment of Moron Movies, and of its importance as an artifact marking a moment in film history.

What happens if we grant Len Cella his due and take seriously his imperfect and beautifully strange collection of 18-second films? Is his work simply the product of technical advances in home moviemaking technology, or does it really explore new ways of thinking about media production and artmaking? What does the mixed, complex, and shifting public reception of his film tell us about generational changes in the limited audience that would seek out a film called Moron Movies? And where, if we are brave enough to make a prediction, will the film be on its 50th birthday?

Provenance

Just before midnight on December 11, 1984, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) returned from a commercial break. Johnny Carson said: “Before Buddy Hackett comes out, this might be a good place to do the ‘Moron Movies’ because they’re a little off the wall also. They’re short, homemade, off-the-wall, bizarre little episodes.”[1]

I saw, on my parent’s television, Carson’s brief introduction and the nine films that followed: GETTING RID OF THE RAISINS, THE CHEAT, A COOK’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL, HOW TO STRIKE OUT, THE CHICKEN COMEDIAN, POOR MAN’S REMOTE CONTROL, HOW TO DISCOURAGE PICKPOCKETS, HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE UGLY, and RULES WERE MEANT TO BE BROKEN.

I was dumbstruck. No wonder Carson was at a loss as to what to call these films. They were funny enough to air on the steadfastly mainstream Tonight Show, but the laughter built slowly, and the studio audience was perplexed.

Moviemaking Conventions

If Cella’s film defies moviemaking conventions, which conventions are involved, and how, specifically, is this achieved? If rules are meant to be broken, what rules does Moron Movies break? To consider Cella’s practice in relationship to traditional cinematic editing, a brief review of two classic texts can help clarify conventional practices and where Cella’s editing diverges.

I teach editing at a university, helping students understand the use of conventional / “standard” film shots and how these can be cut together. To deliver an initial conceptual framework of these ideas to my students, I refer to Sergei Eisenstein’s essay “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,”[2] and I very carefully balance this material with concepts from André Bazin’s “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.”[3] For advanced students, these can be assigned readings. For beginning students, I present the key ideas through lectures and demonstrations.

Eisenstein posits montage as the central element of filmmaking, presenting its use as the filmmaker’s primary tool to control an audience’s attention. He also claims its use as a method for creating emotional effects. Eisenstein proposes that meaning emerges in “conflicts” that occur at the instant of change from one image to another—the actual edit point—and in the patterns that develop in an edited series of shots.

Eisenstein describes his debate on editing theory with Vsevolod Pudovkin, a discussion on the specific nature of montage-based meaning-creation: “A graduate of the Kuleshov school, he [Pudovkin] loudly defends an understanding of montage as a linkage of pieces. Into a chain. Again, ‘bricks.’ Bricks arranged in a series to expound an idea. I confronted him with my viewpoint on montage as a collision. A view that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept.”[4] Eisenstein calls the psychological effects arising from these collisions “sensations.”

In opposition to Eisenstein, André Bazin considers the use of montage to “force” the viewer’s gaze to be a crude, artificial approach. He suggests letting the viewer’s eye study a deep-focus shot. Bazin claims that “depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.”[5] The value of this, Bazin believes, is that “while analytical montage only calls for [a viewer] to follow his guide, to let his attention follow along smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he should see, [in a deep-focus shot] he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is from his attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives.”[6]

These two texts provide a theoretical framework clarifying traditional approaches to cinematic montage—conventional moviemaking theory. Cella is seemingly not familiar with, or not engaged with, these ideas. Whether that is from a lack of training (he is self-taught and did not go to film school or work with other filmmakers) or if it demonstrates a pragmatic set of choices emerging from his home-based, solo production of ultrashort films, the result is the same. Whether Cella is rejecting tradition, or simply disregarding the “cinematic” approach and replacing it with production techniques similar to those a teenager with a cell phone might use for a TikTok video, he films and cuts minimally and simplistically. He delivers the minimum information needed for his films. Eisenstein and Bazin give us a baseline to discuss the specifics of his filmmaking.

Visual Arts Practice

To examine the idea that Cella’s work emerges from visual arts practice rather than moviemaking conventions, Arthur C. Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace[7] and Remarks on Art and Philosophy[8] provide needed definitions and a conceptual framework regarding the nature of art. Specifically, Danto proposes a definition of art focused on meaning and embodiment, two characteristics useful for understanding the specifics of video art—circa 1980—as distinct from traditional filmmaking practice. If one wants to consider how Cella’s work is aligned with that of early 1980s video artists, rather than independent filmmakers from that period or earlier, Danto’s definition is useful. As well, Danto’s foregrounding of “embodiment” is helpful if we wish to comprehend the nature of Cella’s hybrid practice of combining home movie tools (his Super 8 camera) with home video / VHS finishing techniques.

Danto’s definitions, and the conceptual ideas around those definitions, were developed and refined in iterations from 1981’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace to the end of his life. “I knew that I was going to have to give a definition of art that would hold water,” Danto explained in an address about his writing on art philosophy and criticism. “I managed to come up with two necessary conditions. … The first one was that it’s got to be about something. It’s got to represent something. It’s got to have a meaning.”[9] While it might seem silly to ascribe the rather heavy word “meaning” to some of Len Cella’s ridiculous and extremely short jokes, the distinction here is between Cella’s work and our present-day use of the term “content.” Even Cella’s basest jokes can be seen to “mean” something, especially in contrast with our contemporary approval of posting “content” that marks the existence of the content creator but does little else.  

“And then I came up with this idea that there are many things that have meaning, but the interesting thing about artworks is that they embody their meanings,”[10] Danto continues. “So I came up with the thought that for X to be a work of art, X has to have meaning, and embody it. But different objects will embody their meaning in different kinds of ways, and the meaning picks out the properties of the physical object that consist in the embodiment of that meaning.”[11]

As we will see later, Cella’s Moron Movies does not present as “a film” despite having been initially screened in theatres. It is read as “a video” or “a videotape.” Depending on the audience, that embodiment has included a range of specific outlets—from nationwide broadcast on NBC to being discovered on a VHS tape found in the trash—but Moron Movies’ visual characteristics and format coincide with the “embodiment” associated with the videotapes of museum-based video artists presenting circa 1980.

Research Gaps

We can draw from the writings of Eisenstein, Bazin, and Danto, and thereby theorize the specific characteristics of Moron Movies and Len Cella’s practice, but there is a massive research gap beyond that baseline task. No academic writing seems to exist that addresses the film or the filmmaker. Casual writers (for example, bloggers) have made their thoughts available, but these documents mainly push the idea of Cella as somehow anticipating social media—despite significant evidence to the contrary.

As well, the ratings that exist for the film are primarily from the United States and Canada. The film does not seem to have been released, sold, or broadcast anywhere else. While opportunities to view the film expanded with YouTube and other online venues, there has never been any reason for significant interest about the film outside of North America.

The MTV, YouTube, and TikTok Generations

In April of 2023 I presented at the national conference of the Popular Culture Association in San Antonio, Texas. I discussed how the filmmaker Wim Wenders had made a social media commercial for the Salvatore Ferragamo fashion line, and I examined how Wenders and his editor had adapted their editing techniques to match the taste and attention span of the specific generation that was now Ferragamo’s expected clientele. As well, I discussed changes I saw in my younger university students and their comprehension of the ideas of continuity editing.

My presentation was placed under the rubric of “Generational Studies,” and I learned a great deal from other conference presenters. They addressed the current academic thinking in that field. I realized that while the accepted generational guidelines they used—based generally on technological change rather than world events—seemed correct, the fields of video production and media studies had slightly different relevant milestones to consider. I realized that my own bingeing of music videos in MTVs heyday was different than the media diet of someone whose teen years coincided with YouTube’s early expansion or with the growth of TikTok.

The term “Generational Studies” can refer to the generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe, but in recent years has been primarily associated with the writing of Dr. Jean M. Twenge. A C-SPAN hosted video and educational site[12] featuring Twenge places generational milestones in these groups: “Silents (1925-1945), Boomers (1946-1964), Gen. X (1965-1979), Millennials (1980-1994), Gen. Z (1995-2012), and the “Polars” (2013-today).” It is unproductive to simply expect everyone in a given generation to react the same way, but my students, who are from Gen. Z, turn out to be infinitely forgiving of Len Cella’s technical issues. As well, they are quite comfortable with Cella’s 18-second format.

A Changing Grammar of the Edit

Does Moron Movies reveal how frail our assumptions about cinematic language are? We have privileged the ideas of Eisenstein and Bazin to the point where their conception of editing provides the basic theory and starting point for much of our mainstream cinema production. University students watching the early “reels” of William Wegman[13]remark on the “lack” of editing, since the default assumption is that film and video should be shaped and refined in some way if the end product is something other than a social media clip.

As Deirdre Boyle explains in Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited,[14] the early use of portable video cameras, from 1965 to 1968, involved documenting artist-instigated “happenings,” a mode of production that did not focus on editing. Access to editing technology lagged behind, leaving community-based activists and documentarians waiting. Artists moved ahead. Boyle describes a key moment, again associated with art and artists and unedited videotape:

One version of the birth of portable video begins on an October day in 1965 when Korean-born artist Nam June Paik purchased one of the first portable video cameras and recorders at the Liberty Music Store in New York City. Hopping in a cab and pointing his half-inch,

black-and-white video camera out the window, as the story goes, he recorded the arrival of Pope Paul VI in New York on his way to address the United Nations. That evening Paik played his tape at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village and circulated a video manifesto declaring this new electronic medium would revolutionize art and information….[15]

It is notable, then, that Moron Movies does not feel like a documentation of performance art, but instead like an evolved continuation of the “actualities” of the Lumiere Brothers. In an alternate timeline where cinematic editing was never invented, Moron Movies makes perfect sense. Cella has little interest in using traditional establishing shots or working with the scale of shots in the way an independent filmmaker would. He points the camera at the next bit of information he needs for his joke, the same way a cellphone filmmaker might. Today Cella’s direct-to-camera presentation and disregard for continuity editing suits the aesthetic a new generation embraces.

Then again, if we look at Moron Movies with the same toolset we use for “serious” cinema, we discover a rigorous structure in it. With title cards at the beginning of each of the 189 segments that make up the film, Cella disrupts any possibility of cinematic immersion, breaking the conceits of traditional cinematic editing. The result is closer to a stand-up comedy routine than to a traditionally-edited comedy feature. There is a set up in each title card, and then the film segment itself is the punch line.

Cella’s purposeful rejection of mainstream filmmaking is easily missed. Public reactions to the film assume this is simply a clumsy effort, but that one might love or hate the film anyway, depending on one’s sense of humour. Cella has been lauded as the first YouTuber, a primordial TikToker, and an amateur filmmaking legend, yet his work is often dismissed as a collection of “dad jokes.” What happens if we treat his work in the same way that we would the museum-targeted videos of William Wegman or Ilene Segalove?

If Moron Movies—seen by millions through its The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) broadcasts and its long run as a video rental—is to be considered as part of a 20th century film canon, we need to understand its evolving relationship with a public audience that is only now becoming brave enough to watch the film in an unironic way.

Collecting and decoding public reactions to Moron Movies allows us to look at what it contains at its heart—beyond our nervous laughter. With these reactions as background, we can consider the film’s production techniques as an alternative approach, rather than as a failed or naïve approach. If we accept the film in this way, it can be argued that Moron Movies is an unpretentious reminder that cinema is only a century old, shaped by quickly-changing technology, and built on a fragile set of assumptions about editing and human comprehension. Is there room for work that exists somewhere between cinema and art? 

Public Reaction, Then and Now

The mixed reaction experienced by Tonight Show viewers has been echoed over decades by reviewers on public forums from discussion boards to IMDb to Letterboxd. Accessing IMDb on May 16, 2023, we find that there are 21 IMDb user reviews available, posted from April 28, 2001, to December 1, 2018. There is an intriguing gap between that 2018 review and the previous review, dated October 20, 2010. For nearly eight years, Moron Movies seems to have been forgotten, at least by IMDb reviewers. Still, this collection of reviews spans almost 20 years, the traditional measurement for a “generation.”

These 21 reviews exist alongside a larger set of “user ratings” in a system that allows scoring from one to ten. With 180 user ratings, averaging 5.6 out of 10, we see a breakdown where the highest rating (10) has 21.7% of the vote (39 votes) and the lowest rating (1) has 26.7% of the vote (48 votes). The highest and lowest possible ratings dominate.

This notable split—which seems to indicate a “love it” or “hate it” reaction rather than an evaluative score—is demonstrated in another way if we break the scores down into three rating categories. We find an even split between high, medium, and low ratings.

If we consider a rating of 10, 9, or 8 as a “high” score, we see:

            10        39 votes

            9          13 votes

            8          8 votes

If we consider a rating of 7, 6, 5, or 4 as a “medium” score, we see:

            7          17 votes

            6          15 votes

            5          17 votes

            4          7

If we consider a rating of 3, 2, or 1 as a “low” score, we see:

            3          8 votes

            2          8 votes

            1          48 votes

An even division is evident:

            60 votes in the HIGH category

            56 votes in the MEDIUM category

            64 votes in the LOW category

There is no consensus on Moron Movies. The scores are split toward the voting extremes (the most common scores are 10s and 1s), indicating a polarity in audience reaction. No viewpoint wins out: we see an even division between high, medium, and low score categories indicating an overall divided response from the self-selecting audience that voted.

Note that IMDb shows no external reviews, and no Metacritic reviews, for Moron Movies. The film is abandoned by conventional reviewers. That makes sense, as it is not available on any streamers or networks. You must seek it out, and only a tiny audience does.

Letterboxd reveals a similar pattern, though more generous in scoring. The average is 3.3 stars out of 5, which could be considered a 6.6 out of 10 on IMDb.

If we consider a rating of 5, 4.5, or 4 as a “high” score, we see:

5          9 votes

4.5       5 votes

4          14 votes

If we consider a rating of 3.5, 3, 2.5 or 2 as a “medium” score, we see:

3.5       5 votes

3          14 votes

2.5       7 votes

2          9 votes

If we consider a rating of 1.5, 1 or .5 as a “low” score, we see:

1.5       4 votes

1          4 votes

.5         3 votes

These divisions seem to skew positive compared to the IMDb results:

28 votes in the HIGH category

35 votes in the MEDIUM category

11 votes in the LOW category

            The Letterboxd reviews begin November 27, 2014, but there is a gap to February 11, 2018. They then continue into May 10, 2023. These reviews are mostly recent, which reminds us that IMDb and Letterboxd offer a limited, imperfect sample of public reception.

With no pre-2001 online archive of viewer posts for comparison, any hope to consider audience reception to Moron Movies over time (especially from its release until 2001) must rely on additional personal statements. Interestingly, the anecdotes that do exist clarify the specific nature of the notably mixed reactions seen in online reviews and the “love it” or “hate it” reaction seemingly inherent in the Moron Movies viewing experience. For example, Philadelphia artist, musician, and collector Perry Shall describes discovering the film when he was ten, and then rediscovering it a decade later:

We would go to Blockbuster when they still would carry stuff that was a little bit out of the ordinary, which eventually they stopped doing.… And so I saw this thing on the shelf and it was called “Moron Movies.” … So we get it. I go home, I start playing it, and I go, “Huh?” I don’t know if it clicks with me. … Fast forward to high school. … I walked the street and there were boxes of VHS tapes in the trash at a neighbour’s house. … So I’m flipping through and I pull out this homemade VHS tape and it says on it “Scarface / Moron Movies” on one tape. I ran back to my friend’s house … I put it on and watched everybody’s reactions. … You could see without words: they go, “I don’t get it.” And I’m watching it, and I’m going, “Oh my God, I am so thankful to discover this at this moment in my life, or to rediscover it. This is the funniest, most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.”[16]

Generational Shifts in Reception?

In recent years, concepts from the field of “generational studies” have been used in hope of better understanding audience reception for film and video works. Real and measurable differences can be seen when we compare large groups of people born in different time periods. Each generation’s experience with technology (and the media ingested through that technology) shapes their expectations and reactions enough to matter. Individuals vary greatly, but my undergraduate students—who grew up watching YouTube in their formative years—have a different experience with the rules of cinematic continuity than someone my age.

I grew up watching Hollywood-made theatrical films. My students watched online videos that emphasized direct-to-camera address and de-emphasized continuity cutting. The millions in Johnny Carson’s audience on the nights where Moron Movies clips were shown came from four defined generations. In 1984, members of “The Greatest Generation” would have been between 57 and 83, “The Silent Generation” between 39 and 56, “The Baby Boom Generation” between 20 and 38, and “Generation X” between 4 and 19.[17]  The age groups that were too young to see those original Tonight Show broadcasts—specifically “The Millennial Generation,” “Generation Z,” and “Generation Alpha”—have experience with phone cameras and publishing homemade videos on social media outlets. It is likely they are less impressed by Cella’s work ethic, and less willing to credit him just for the act of making something. 

Moron Movies has migrated to YouTube.com and archive.org, so its audience is now primarily viewers familiar with social media. Consider this 2022 Letterboxd review, in which reviewer “Callisto” gives the film ½ star. Note how often the review addresses TikTok and a concept of “TikTok humour.”

Immediately from its first frame I burst out laughing, nearly in tears, and I had to pause because I couldn’t stop. It’s so stupid. Moron Movies is the perfect title. The jokes don’t start out as bad taste, but he eventually brings in more and more potty humor. Children could certainly come up with some of these stupid jokes, but they just wouldn’t hit as hard as Len Cella’s writing and line delivery. It truly is remarkable what moronic things the human mind can come up with. The jokes are so stupid that if he put these out during the TikTok era on TikTok, he would be the most famous and successful TikTok comedian among people who love this stupid humor. I have only seen a handful of TikToks from watching streams or videos, but this was like watching them for 83 minutes (for both movies without any credits) (how do people do this on a daily basis in real life?!), only much better thanks to the old 80s shot-on-video quality and deliver of this genius. It also helps they’re filmed in 4:3 rather than that awful portrait mode crap, whatever that aspect ratio is.

I admire this man’s dedication for producing this himself in the mid-80s, but over an hour of TikTok is not for me. That’s enough TikTok for my whole life and not only do I not use TikTok, but I have the sequel to watch after this. I laughed so much in the beginning, but now I can’t wait until it ends. It also doesn’t help that the jokes progressively get less and less funny (perhaps stupider?). If this were instead a short, it would be much more tolerable. The biggest lesson this film teaches you is that moronic (TikTok) humor has always existed, and this is 30 years before TikTok and before widespread use of the Internet, for that matter![18]

An April 2023 review is more generous, giving 4 and ½ stars, but again locking Cella’s work into the prison of TikTok. Reviewer “thecodyguy” writes:

They called Len Cella crazy. You’d call him crazy now. But look at all of you people today watching stupid skits and videos on YouTube and TikTok. This movie did that well before those existed and it’s a miracle. It’s a series of TikTok sketches for the generation raised on the funnies and Mad Magazine. It’s a singular exercise in absurdity.[19]

It is interesting to see the concept of “absurdity” appear in this review. For the reviewer, the point is Cella’s embrace of a certain kind of comedy. There is another association, however, more relevant to understanding Cella’s filmmaking.

Cella’s A COOK’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL appears at 44 minutes and 18 seconds into Moron Movies. (It was one of the nine selections I saw on Carson’s December 11, 1984 broadcast.) It begins, as all the segments do, with a shot of white plastic letters spelling out the title. Cella presents this text on the diagonal, slanting down on the left, leaning backwards away from the camera. This an amateur set up. One could use a copy stand, put the camera directly above the text, square it up … but this is good enough, as it was for many hobbyists making home movies. The background is azure blue, but unevenly lit, lighter at screen left and darker at screen right. This stays on the screen briefly, then cuts to a shot of a frying pan, centred with the handle extending out of the frame on screen right. The countertop, serving as a background to the frying pan, is a pinkish red.

The key visual element is that this pan has been modified. It has about eighty tacks glued onto it, point-side up. After a few seconds, two hands ease in at the top of the frame, cracking and spilling an egg into the pan. The hands recede, then appear again, spilling a second egg. We are left to imagine the impossible task of sliding anything under the eggs to flip them, scramble them or to take them out of the pan.

Cella’s pan is a visual relative to Man Ray’s sculpture Cadeau (Gift), an object demonstrating the Dada movement’s fascination with the absurd. Consider this description, presented with the object at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, conveniently located just eleven miles from Cella’s home:

On December 13, 1921, the day of his first solo exhibition in Paris, Man Ray purchased an ordinary flat iron, a box of tacks, and a tube of glue. He glued the tacks onto the iron, titled it Cadeau, and added it to the exhibition. This iconoclastic object exemplifies Man Ray’s emphasis on the juxtaposition of two completely unrelated elements in his assemblages, which he explained were “designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify, inspire reflection, but not to arouse admiration for any technical excellence usually sought or valued in objects classified as works of art.”[20] 

Certainly Cella could have seen the Man Ray sculpture and stolen the idea, or unconsciously reimagined it. He might simply have been inspired. The audacity of bringing a Dada worldview into his 1980s homemade video practice makes all forgivable, even laudable.

Is it wrong to credit Cella, the man behind ANIMALS SHOULD WEAR UNDERWEAR, with the subtle wit of our best Dada artists? Perhaps. It turns out A COOK’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL is not Cella’s first version of this joke. Earlier in Moron Movies, at 10 minutes and 56 seconds into the program, we have already seen CARPENTER’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL. In this, Cella also presents an absurd object—a hammer held by a string instead of a wooden handle—and its broken functionality becomes a diabolical punishment. And, at 34 minutes and 59 seconds, we have A CHEF’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL, another version of the concept where the pan was modified with a central bolt. We watch our tormented chef try to pry out what appears to be a pork chop. Cella’s repetition of ideas is rare in mainstream cinematic practice—where the goal is generally to make a single long-duration film—but in line with visual arts practice, where Claude Monet painted thirty evolving views of Rouen Cathedral. Perry Shall, a Moron Movies fan who would eventually become Cella’s friend, observed Cella implementing a similar strategy of making, testing, and selecting individual films as components of his master collection:

And so this guy was just creating endless content, hundreds, I would say, or at least over 100 videos that were only ending up to be 15 seconds. Probably spent a day each filming them, you know, and writing them and all that stuff. And he’s just so naturally hilarious. So what he did was he’d have people come over, they’d watch the movies. If he didn’t get a laugh, he would pull that movie out of the final product. And he continued, he would continue to do that for years, even after it got great reactions. If one joke stopped landing, he would remove it because he wanted this perfect piece of work….[21]

Cella’s path to filmmaking began after his exploration of other visual arts. Simon Mercer’s King Dongdocumentary reveals Len Cella’s painting, drawing, and process of refining the interior of his home. “Yeah, everything in my apartment was done by me,” Cella says. “I just feel more comfortable, you know, making things. I mean, to me, any work of art, it has to be pure. You have to do everything.”[22]

Categorization

How much of the work of early 1980s video artists have you watched and taken seriously? Is this work within our concept of “cinema,” or is it contained only in our notion of “art”? Is our categorization shaped by the tools of production, the function of the work, or something else?

Before one places Cella’s Moron Movies into any category, it is prudent to consider the work of artists Ilene Segalove and William Wegman. Like Cella, these artists presented works based on autobiographical material, embraced technologies less refined than Hollywood’s 35mm cinema cameras, and used quirky, sly humour. We put their production into the category of video art. We read their videos as aimed at museum exhibition, though we do this against evidence in the work itself, which hints at a goal of television broadcast. Segalove’s Why I Got Into TV and Other Stories (1983) and More TV Stories (1985) are certainly ready for broadcast.

Wegman screened Man Ray and Mic (1981)[23] on Saturday Night Live (1975) two years before Cella’s films made it to television. It is hard to ignore the visual and structural similarities to the Cella films. Wegman’s film opens with a title card (yellow on blue rather than white on blue, but similar enough), then reveals Wegman placing a microphone on the ground in front of his dog, moving offscreen, and then telling the dog to “drop it.” When Man Ray (Wegman’s dog, not the 1920s artist) obeys, we hear the startlingly clear sound of the object being dropped in front of the microphone. The film presents its tiny joke in 30 seconds, using a set up / punchline structure. Wegman has adapted his gallery-oriented 1970s video work for 1980s television, where brevity is essential. One wonders if Cella happened to catch this broadcast.

The problem with categorizing this type of work—and therefore the work of Cella—through its intended outlet is that we exacerbate the false narratives that relying on “the artist’s intent” can create. If we imagine three works filmed with identical equipment but distributed into three distinct silos—cinema, video art, television—then we are likely to resolve our categorization dilemma by seeking out or claiming to know the artist’s intention. This is an unreliable approach. If you have not considered the problem of “intentionality” before, begin with W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. C. Beardsley’s critique of focusing on an artist’s claimed or imagined intent.

In “The Intentional Fallacy” they write: “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.”[24] If, instead, we primarily consider the work of art itself, leaving intention and function as secondary factors, less important and less trustworthy, we realize that “cinema,” “video art” and “television” are arbitrary categorizations. These categories can be useful, but lead to subdividing works based on styles, traditions, personal taste, or commercial trends.

Is Moron Movies some sort of hybrid work, triangulating art, cinema, and television? It is shot on film, so it is cinema. Yet it dismisses editing conventions, so it is not. It breaks up time into rigid informational chunks, so it is television. Its content, however, is personal, absurd, and dreamlike, so it is video art. Or, one wonders, is it simply naïve cinema? David Bordwell’s On the History of Film Style provides helpful context:

The history of cinema is most commonly understood as a narrative that traces the emergence of film as a distinct art. Call this the Basic Story. Stretches of the Basic Story are now questionable, but, tacitly or explicitly, it has been the point of departure for the historical study of film style. The Basic Story tells us that cinematic style developed by modifying the capacity of the motion picture camera to record an event. According to the Story, in the course of the 1910s and 1920s particular film techniques were elaborated that made cinema less a pure recording medium than a distinct means of artistic expression. The saga begins with cinema as a record of everyday incidents, as in the actualité films of Louis Lumiere.[25]

If we make the effort to consider Moron Movies as a 1983 actuality film, with Cella recording “everyday incidents” in 189 films, a comparison to the Lumiere actualities is not entirely ridiculous. At least, no more so than any other academic effort to comprehend JELLO MAKES A LOUSY DOORSTOP or THE PERVERTED CAMERAMAN.

Cella attempts only minimal editing in Moron Movies. More advanced techniques are applied in More Moron Movies, but Cella’s edits remain at the level university students achieve at the midpoint of their first editing class. Cella depends on putting something fascinating in front of the camera, usually himself or an art object created for use on camera.

Cella’s craft, beyond editing, is limited, parallel to that of the Lumieres circa 1895. There is no creative use of depth of field, no camera movement, no crafted lighting. Consider, as a comparison, The Lumieres’ L’Arroseur Arrosé (1895). It is very short, has no cuts, no closeups, and no camera movement.[26] An editor making it today would want to cut to a close up, hoping to increase the impact of the humour when we see the main character squirted by a hose.

Comparing Moron Movies to this Lumiere actuality seems fair. Is Moron Movies, then, not just old-school cinema, but an example of the oldest-school cinema? Has Cella taken the Lumieres’ approach, added sound and colour, and embraced a minimal practice to match his minimal jokes? Does Moron Movies embody its meaning?

Keep in mind that Cella is not choosing minimalism as an aesthetic. His craft and his tools are simply limited—and limiting. Cella’s equipment consists of a Super 8 film camera, a hobbyist text board for making his omnipresent title cards, and a minimal lighting kit with no evident diffusion modifiers. Ironically, this is a step above the 8mm gear young Sammy Fabelman starts with in Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans (2022).

Yet Cella is not the prodigy Spielberg/Fabelman is. He uses his equipment in a way that exhibits a lack of technical skill, or a distaste for it, resulting in poor exposure, poor framing, poor focus, etc. Is this a punk aesthetic? An anti-cinema stance? Or simply a man who is a house painter by trade, self-taught and working alone, primarily focused on delivering a set of jokes in his own fashion? It is worth noting that no reviewers comment on these technical issues. The perceived lack of technical quality in the Moron Movies films only adds to the humour, or the audacity of delivering that humour.

Construction

One tool for understanding the construction of Moron Movies is to examine its title cards. There are 190 cards, beginning with “THE MORNING AFTER” at 26 seconds in and ending with “THANK YOU” at 57 minutes and 20 seconds. The 189 films in the program, from that first title card to the final card, last for 56 minutes and 54 seconds. If we include the opening graphic and dedication credit in our timing, the film is exactly fifty-seven minutes long. That is 3,420 seconds. If we divide that by our 190 title cards, we find an average duration of 18 seconds of content for each card.

Imagine this as a filmmaking task: from the instant where the title card appears until the next card appears on you have 18 seconds, and three seconds are taken up by the title card. Cella is therefore working with 15-second-long films, in 1983, decades before an army of TikTokers would explore this length.

Do not, however, credit Cella with precision timing. The rigorous timing seems accidental, a by-product of his process. The fine details of his craftwork, if you look closely, turn out to be ragged. For example, the title cards vary in duration in an arbitrary manner. “THE MORNING AFTER” is 2 seconds, 11 frames long, “HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF” is 3 seconds, 14 frames long, “HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE A NERD” is 4 seconds, 26 frames long. It is possible these durations are just how long Cella happened to run his Super 8 camera when filming title setups, rather than the more traditional approach of filming longer clips and editing them down to some chosen duration. Cella takes his roles of writer, actor, and set designer seriously, but is more relaxed about his role of editor. It is not his metier.

The seemingly elegant timing of the Moron Movies collection happens despite the inclusion of KING DONG, which runs 55 seconds. Next to last in the program, KING DONG, Cella’s earliest work included in the Moron Moviesset, is a troubling film. According to Cella:

Somewhere around 1968 or 1969, my brother came home with this … this bomb shell, the casing of a bomb. The thing was like six feet long, and I said, “Oh, Christ, I got to do something with that.” So I thought of the idea of chasing this maid with this big dong. And I called it “King Dong.” So I painted the thing pink. I painted this bombshell pink. But it was so heavy I had to, uh, I had to put a rope around it to hold as I’m going after the maid. In the film, in “King Dong,” I actually rest the dong on a trash can. And wipe my brow because the fucking thing is so heavy. But that was the origin of “King Dong.”

This explanation, presented in King Dong (2011), Simon Mercer’s documentary on Cella, is mystifying.[27]Most of Moron Movies demonstrates a wiseass, dad-joke vibe. It is a specific worldview, mocking the human tendency to take shortcuts or cheat, to practice laziness, stupidity, or cheapness. It is sometimes questionable, yet never reads as extreme. But Cella’s KING DONG has a different tone, harsher and genuinely offensive despite Cella playing both attacker and victim. Why include it? Why salvage it from 1969 and use it? KING DONG is literally an attempted rape scene. Perhaps Cella would say that comedy should not be overly self-censoring. I expect I am not alone, however, in feeling KING DONG’s humour misses the mark and crosses the line. My university students are in “Generation Z,” and call out what they find offensive. I cannot show them the full version of Cella’s Moron Movies because of the inclusion of KING DONG.

I like to imagine that if I did, they would suggest ways to rework it. Perhaps they would transform it into a spoof of the early Godzilla movies, with Cella using his six-foot pink appendage to knock down cardboard buildings on a set meant to look like Tokyo. I expect The Tonight Show would decline to broadcast that—they did not include KING DONG on the broadcasts—but it would be an improvement over the problematic current version.

Dissemination

How did Cella’s work get to The Tonight Show and its millions of viewers, anyway? The show was notoriously tough to book, especially for those not already in the public eye. Johnny Carson explained Cella’s inclusion to his audience:

We read an article about a man in Philadelphia who makes his own movies. Apparently, he would make these eight millimeter home movies and have them transferred to tape. Then I understand he hired a theater, or started to show them in a theater in Philadelphia. These are not normal movies, you understand?

Where does our appreciation of Cella and his “not normal” movies end up? Simon Mercer’s King Dong (2011) documentary reveals more about Cella’s determination to get his films shown. Cella says:

I’d read a book about El Cordobés. El Cordobés was a matador, kind of a renegade matador. And he was having trouble getting to go in the ring. They wouldn’t let him in the ring, to do his thing. So he built his own bull ring. I said, that’s it. I’ll get my own theater. Fuck ‘em. So I started shopping around for places to rent. And there was a second floor of a Lansdowne theater.[28]

Sophistication and its Discontents

Is Cella a genius, using visual arts strategies to amplify his homemade films? Is he an autodidact, learning from Man Ray and William Wegman (with his dog, Man Ray)? Is he a nightclub comedian? Do his jokes land?

There is growth between Moron Movies (1983) and More Moron Movies (1985). I have downplayed Cella as an editor, but in his second film his practice enters a more sophisticated phase. Cella learns to cut to reaction shots, and to use shots that reveal new information or a second character. He has developed a comedic language, and he is using it with gusto.

The most surprising development, however, is that he begins to build on ideas in the films he has already made. He explores the possibilities of the serial nature of his films. For example, in Moron Movies, at about 8 minutes and 17 seconds in, we see HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE COCKEYED. After the title card, we see a profile view of Mr. Cella looking at two small paintings on the wall. One is obviously crooked, its right side twisted upwards so that it is now diagonal rather than aligned with a level horizontal line. He looks over to the painting on the right, which looks level to us, reaches up and … twists up its right side. His fix for the problem makes the paintings match, but now both are diagonal. The joke has taken us in to a problem, given us an expectation, and then revealed an unexpected solution.

In More Moron Movies, Cella doubles down. At 43 minutes and 32 seconds into the program, we see HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE. After the title card, we have a squared up view of two paintings similar to the ones in HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE COCKEYED. This time they are vertical instead of horizontal, and they feature blue and green areas rather than just black and white lines. They are level, aligned with an imagined horizon line.

Instantly we see a problem: at the bottom right of the shot, a pair of hands holds a gun. The hands rig the gun on a small string attached to the painting. The hands now carefully lower the gun so it will hang below the frame, and then adjust the painting so that it tilts down to the right. The hands let go and move out of the shot. We realize someone will come along, adjust the painting, and thus pull the gun’s trigger. In seconds, someone does enter our shot. The “wife,” Mr. Cella in a blonde wig, walks in, looks at the paintings, and … adjusts the painting on the left so that it also tilts to the right. The plot is foiled. The wife leaves the frame, letting us fully appreciate the two slanted paintings.

If we only watch More Moron Movies, the joke is pretty good. If one is a loyal Cella fan, and has seen Moron Movies first, it is incredible. It is just a comedic “call back,” but it is a sophisticated one. The universe Cella’s characters live in is consistent, and the rules of that universe persist from film to film.

Cella as a Video Artist

Our conception of Cella as a video artist begins with the visual characteristics we observe in his work as it comes to us today. The look created by the cheap video transfer methods he used, and the fact that his work has been “preserved” through digitization of video tapes rather than from a scan of original film material, leads us to forget that he shot on Super 8 film and endeavoured to project his films in a theatre in front a live audience. He is not intentionally a video maker.

Yet even Johnny Carson mentioned Cella’s transfer to tape, so the technical characteristics and “VHS look” reviewers see in the work are inherent in it and present from its first television broadcast. Lacking cinematography skills, and unable to achieve a quality video transfer, Cella manages to get the worst of both worlds into each frame of his movie. Is that funnier, or hard to watch? Generation Z likes the VHS look, but they would rather just add a filter to achieve it.

In the end, for Cella’s practice video is a just a distribution tool, just as TikTok is a distribution tool for a segment of today’s filmmakers. His eventual distribution in video rental outlets relied on VHS tape. The version of his film that is preserved at archive.org has a significant video glitch or tape repair at about 46 minutes and 45 seconds, wiping out one of his short films. It is safe to assume this digitization was from a VHS cassette.

Cella was never one of the artists set free by video production techniques. He is not exploring the durational possibilities videotape offers. Conversely, he seems uninterested in the possibilities of traditional cinematic assembly, the act of building meaning from many carefully planned shots. Cella is simply doing everything in his own way. Cella is doing Cella.

Canons and Cult Status

Where will Len Cella’s Moron Movies be on its 50th birthday?

Reading David Bordwell’s account, in On the History of Film Style, of the establishment of early film canons, we gain an insight that practical matters and institutional choices play a major role in this process. Bordwell notes:

In 1939 MOMA opened in new quarters on 53rd Street, and as part of the occasion the Film Library launched a cycle of seventy films surveying “the main body of film-making from 1895 onwards.” The thirty programs presented an overview of the Basic Story, including “The Development of Narrative” (1895-1902), programs on early American masters, “The German Film: Legend and Fantasy,” “The Swedish Film,” and ending with a potpourri of sound-film genres. Now that MOMA had a theater of its own, Barry began daily screenings from the collection, thereby making the Film Library the first archive to offer regular public exhibition.[29]

Certain films were available for public screenings, others were not, and only a select set of films fit the narrative the Museum of Modern Art (and Iris Barry, head of its Film Library) intended to construct and promote.

Inevitably, vagaries of availability and notoriety slanted the MOMA canon. The Film Library had access to relatively few films from the major French silent directors, so Feuillade, Delluc, and their contemporaries were scantily represented. Whereas some archivists believed in seeing and collecting as much as possible, Barry was highly selective. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko formed MOMA’s great Soviet troika, while Dziga Vertov, Boris Barnet, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Yutkevich, and the Fex collaborators Grigori

Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg were virtually ignored.[30]

To be included in any canon, a film must be available, and it must have strong champions that take up its cause. Are there champions for Moron Movies?

Perry Shall, who has a tattoo claiming “WE GET IT / THEY DON’T” across his wrists, provides us with a personal story that positions Moron Movies as something like a cult film rather than as a mainstream comedy. The dynamic described in Shall’s experience is not one where half the audience finds it funny and half does not. Shall is the only viewer in his group of friends to find the film minimally interesting. His positive reaction is intense. The film motivates him to find others with a Moron Movies mindset—and eventually he seeks out Cella himself. “From there on out, all I wanted to do was rewatch Moron Movies over and over again and study this and try to understand … how does this exist? What is the deal? Is Len still alive? Len Cella, the creator? And so that had kind of been my mission for a long time … until I became friends with him.”

Following Shall’s lead and engaging with Moron Movies as a cult film is a challenging task. There is no significant academic literature directly addressing the film in any way, let alone calling for canonization—not as cinema, not as television or pop culture, not as art. If we broaden our search to find similar films that function as cult films, the most relevant academic writing addresses the function of these films in the context of sociological study. This approach, defining and clarifying the characteristics of movies that persist under a “cult film” rubric, excludes many films called “cult films” in popular culture. In “Toward a Sociology of Cult Films: Reading ‘Rocky Horror,’” Patrick T. Kinkade and Michael A. Katovich differentiate “cult films” from “popular re-releases, fad films, films with cult qualities, and critical cult films.”

Cult films have persistent followings who treat them as cinematic experiences that inspire reverence (see Studlar 1989; Chute 1981, 1983). Devotees often champion the merits and values of these films independently of traditional sources of cinematic criticism and analysis. Audiences, moreover, construct ritual and belief systems through their viewing experience. Cult film attachments, therefore, become obsessions and enduring shared foci for habitues. Adherents claim that cult films transcend their entertainment, artistic, commercial status, and are significant regardless of advertisement, critical acclaim, or mainstream acceptance. Part of the cult film’s value to its following is that it is not for everyone and exists outside the category of both popular and elite taste cultures.[31]

Moron Movies is not necessarily excluded under these definitions, but even Shall’s viewing experience hardly demonstrates any sort of transcendent “reverence.” (Or even the fun of the irreverent sing-along central to Rocky Horror (1975) screenings once that film attained cult status.) The choppy, repetitive structure of Moron Movies clearly gets in the way of any extended emotional reaction. The film is not designed or edited with a cathartic release in mind. 

Still, Shall indicates an obsession with Moron Movies, and the film presents a number of the elements Kinkade and Katovich discuss as emblematic of cult films. Moron Movies posits Len Cella as a version of himself, a subversive yet relatable character in atypical situations, pushing against authority as he copes with the aggravation he finds in society. He invents strange—and funny—solutions to the problems he sees in society. This matches the structure Kinkade and Katovich claim for cult cinema: “Cult films contain themes that (1) place typical people into atypical situations, (2) allow for narcissistic and empathic audience identification with subversive characters, (3) question traditional authority structures, (4) reflect societal strains, and (5) offer interpretable and paradoxical resolutions to these social strains.”

Yet Shall’s obsession with the film, and with Cella, seems to be an outlier. Most of the positive reactions that can be documented as personal anecdotes are much milder. An advertisement for a 2015 “Moron Movies Retrospective” at the Cinedelphia Film Festival described a “cult following,” for the film, but sporadic retrospective screenings hardly make for a sustainable cult. No one is dressing as Len Cella and singing along. 

Preservation

While interested viewers in 2033 will probably be able to find an online version of Cella’s work, how will they know to look? What will motivate them to do so?

Cella’s position in 2023 is tenuous. He is a lone outsider, not part of any movement. There is no money to be made, it seems, from streaming or distributing his work. Most importantly, the reviews we have seen so far are all over the place. For each one that embraces the inherent “fun” in Moron Movies, we find something as harsh as this IMDb review that user “jmillhouse20,” posted in May 2002:

Worst Movie Ever

This is truly the worst movie I have ever seen. It is not even remotely funny. The skits are stupid, the premise is stupid. The only reason I laughed was because I could not believe I was sitting through this movie. Watching this movie is a complete waste of time. Anyone responsible for making or releasing this movie should be fired if not arrested.[32]

I have invoked generational studies in this discussion as a tool to predict what future viewers might think of Moron Movies. There is no age-related data in our sources of reviews and ratings, however, so is a fair study even possible? Future perceptions of Cella’s work are unlikely to be shaped by age. Perry Shall’s peers were disinterested in Moron Movies, despite his enthusiasm. Yet it is obvious to those of us who have taught long-term in fields like editing that the reception of time-based media has changed, and that it will continue changing.   

Generations are shaped by technology, and high levels of exposure to the seductive flows of media that technology allows will transform our viewing expectations. The endless flow of MTV music videos, when MTV had videos, was exciting to one generation but soon enough boring to the next. These second-generation viewers expected to choose the next video, following the flow of a personalized playlist. Later, viewers sought the more intensely personal connection they found in a flow of direct-to-camera YouTube videos and Twitch livestreams. These still resonate for some, but others seek the quick jolts of reward they find scrolling the overflowing content that newer, shorter social media formats offer.

Formats evolve. Now we are at an inflection point. We see, in real time, unexpected changes in our audience. In the May 23, 2023 article, “Social Media Can Be a ‘Profound Risk’ to Youth, Surgeon General Warns,” we discover concerning, measurable effects from media.  

The report noted that “frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (important for emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior), and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments.” The report also cited research indicating that up to 95 percent of teens reported using at least one social media platform, while more than one-third said they used social media “almost constantly.” In addition, nearly 40 percent of children ages 8 to 12 use social media, even though the required minimum age for most sites is 13.[33]

In the same way popular snacks in the grocery store have changed, decade by decade, toward more intense bursts of salt, fat, sugar, and raw emotion, popular video evolves.

Can Moron Movies measure up? Despite its reputation as a series of TikToks, it is not really that. It drags, for many, unable to deliver huge shocks, tears, or a warm floating feeling. How can it survive?

Sentiment against Moron Movies has toned down over the last decade. Today’s young people, exposed to more YouTube than mainstream cinema, seem quite forgiving of Moron Movies’ technical and aesthetic flaws. Perhaps the film just needs a glowing, hyped-up introduction, positioning Cella as a revolutionary genius? Maybe its fifty-seven minutes should be broken up and delivered in tiny video groupings that stop before you get bored? Could an unexpected VHS glitch obliterate KING DONG, letting the film end on a gentler note?

I do not think Moron Movies will die from poor reviews. I worry it will die from disinterest. It seems unlikely to thrive in mainstream culture, or even in an alternative film canon.

My suggestion, if you decide you want to preserve this film, is to break the rules. Find the worst things about it: its offensive title, the terrible fifty-five seconds that KING DONG occupies. Play up Cella’s misogynistic plan to shoot his wife, and the film’s many cultural insensitivities. Make lists of these offenses, publish these lists on social media, and organize protests against the film. Propose laws banning it. At the end of your press release, include a link to where people can watch it for themselves, but only to see exactly how awful it is, of course. Something like this:

https://archive.org/details/moron-movies

---

Bibliography

Bazin, André, Hugh Gray, Jean Renoir, and François Truffaut. What Is Cinema? Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2005.

Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Madison, Wisconsin: Irvington Way Press, 2018.

Boyle, Deidre. Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Cella, Len. Things to Worry About (in Case You Run out). Georgetown, CT: Spectacle Lane Press, 1987.

Cottrell, Sarah. “A Year-by-Year Guide to the Different Generations.” Parents, January 29, 2023. https://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/style/generation-names-and-years-a-cheat-sheet-for-parents/.

Danto, Arthur C. Remarks on Art and Philosophy. Mount Desert Island, Maine: Acadia Summer Arts Program, 2014.

Danto, Arthur C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge

Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram.” in Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, 28-44. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

“Johnny Carson Full Episode: Buddy Hackett, John Lithgow, Moron Movies, Tonight Show, 12/11/1984.” YouTube, December 13, 2013. https://youtu.be/7mlvQYZfJ58.

Kinkade, Patrick T. and Michael A. Katovich. “Toward a Sociology of Cult Films: Reading ‘Rocky Horror.’” The Sociological Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1992): 191–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121141.

Mercer, Simon. King Dong. Vimeo, May 18, 2023. https://vimeo.com/23233796.

“Moron Movies (1985).” ‎Letterboxd. Accessed April 19, 2023. https://letterboxd.com/film/moron-movies/.

“Moron Movies (1983): Len Cella: Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive. Accessed April 19, 2023. https://archive.org/details/moron-movies.

Richtel, Matt, Catherine Pearson and Michael Levenson. “Surgeon General Warns That Social Media May Harm Children and Adolescents.” The New York Times, May 24, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/well/family/social-media-mental-health-surgeon-general.html.

Wimsatt, Jr., W. K. and M. C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Jul-Sept, 1946): 468-488.

Filmography

King Dong. 2011. Directed by Simon Mercer.

MAN RAY and MIC. 1981. Directed by William Wegman.

Moron Movies. 1983. Directed by Len Cella.

More Moron Movies. 1986. Directed by Len Cella.

More TV Stories. 1985. Directed by Ilene Segalove.

The Fabelmans. 2022. Directed by Steven Spielberg.

Why I Got Into TV and Other Stories. 1983. Directed by Ilene Segalove.

Biography:

Ted Fisher is an Assistant Professor at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, where he teaches film and video. He earned an M.F.A. in Photography from Claremont Graduate University, a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies from The New School, and an M.F.A. in Film Directing from the University of Edinburgh. His documentaries have screened at fifty film festivals around the world and have been broadcast widely. His writing has been published in Frames Cinema Journal and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Filmography: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3299032/

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[1] “Johnny Carson Full Episode: Buddy Hackett, John Lithgow, Moron Movies, Tonight Show, 12/11/1984.” YouTube, December 13, 2013. https://youtu.be/7mlvQYZfJ58.

[2] Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 28-44.

[3] André Bazin, Hugh Gray, Jean Renoir, and François Truffaut, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 23-40.

[4] Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” 37.

[5] André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 35.

[6] Ibid., 36.

[7] Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981).

[8] Arthur C. Danto, Remarks on Art and Philosophy (Mount Desert Island, Maine: Acadia Summer Arts Program, 2014).

[9] Ibid., 113.

[10] Ibid., 114.

[11] Ibid., 114.

[12] “American Generations: C-SPAN Classroom.” C. Accessed July 25, 2023. https://www.c-span.org/classroom/document/?20840.

[13] “William Wegman.” Electronic Arts Intermix: William Wegman. Accessed July 25, 2023. https://www.eai.org/artists/william-wegman/titles.

[14] Dierdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4.

[15] Ibid., 4.

[16] “Cinepunx Episode 127: Moron Movies with Perry Shall.” Cinepunx, February 2, 2021. https://cinepunx.com/cinepunx-episode-127-moron-movies-with-perry-shall/.

[17] Sarah Cottrell, “A Year-by-Year Guide to the Different Generations,” Parents, January 29, 2023. https://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/style/generation-names-and-years-a-cheat-sheet-for-parents/.

[18] Callisto, “Moron Movies,” review of Moron Movies, by Len Cella (1985), Letterboxd. Accessed May 24, 2023. https://boxd.it/3bNqhD.

[19] thecodyguy, “Moron Movies,” review of Moron Movies, by Len Cella (1985), Letterboxd. Accessed May 24, 2023. https://boxd.it/49CHql.

[20] Man Ray, Cadeau (Gift), 1921. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, accessed May 24, 2023. https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/293203.

[21] “Cinepunx Episode 127: Moron Movies with Perry Shall.” Cinepunx, February 2, 2021. https://cinepunx.com/cinepunx-episode-127-moron-movies-with-perry-shall/.

[22] Len Cella quoted in Simon Mercer, King Dong, Vimeo, May 18, 2023. https://vimeo.com/23233796

[23] “Wegman Film – Saturday Night Live,” YouTube, October 9, 2013. https://youtu.be/tMCdzBzG8pk.

[24] W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Jul-Sept, 1946): 470.

[25] David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Madison, Wisconsin: Irvington Way Press, 2018), 13.

[26] It is worth noting that, like Len Cella’s reuse of ideas in several of his films, there is more than one Lumiere actuality film using the basic concept of L’Arroseur Arrosé.

[27] Simon Mercer, King Dong.

[28] Len Cella quoted in King Dong (2013).

[29] Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 25.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Patrick T. Kinkade, and Michael A. Katovich. “Toward a Sociology of Cult Films: Reading ‘Rocky Horror,’” The Sociological Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1992): 191–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121141.

[32] “User-Submitted Review of ‘Moron Movies.’” IMDb. Accessed May 24, 2023. https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0802388/.

[33] Matt Richtel, Catherine Pearson and Michael Levenson. “Surgeon General Warns That Social Media May Harm Children and Adolescents,” The New York Times, May 24, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/well/family/social-media-mental-health-surgeon-general.html.

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2705

 

“But will they get it abroad?”

This question was posed to Argentine director Lucrecia Martel while pitching a film concept to her producers (2023). If the result of Sight and Sound [S&S]2022’s survey, which did not include a single Latin American film, is any evidence the answer is a resounding no.

In an online lecture titled “Images, Sound, Tourism and War “(2023), she answers that her one conviction is that one should make films for one’s neighbors, and secondly that, to her, it makes no sense to primarily cater to those who” will not suffer the floods, or energy cuts.” She likens the films prioritizing global audiences to tourism pamphlets, which oversimplify the full reality of the region. Forty years earlier, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene (AfroSocialists, 2022[1983]) was posed the same question and took the opportunity to vigorously condemn the enforcement of a tropism, whereby all heads are supposed to turn in the European direction. Such tropism is acutely evident in a research short film by the University of Leeds’s Soft Power, Cinema, and the BRICS (2019), where Prof. Richard A. Sanders, explains BRICS as a Western nomenclature for countries “that are not us, but are trying to be like us,” effectively qualifying the ambition to be “like us” as the only imaginable aspiration. In a certain sense, belonging to the canon, legitimizes Sanders’ affirmation.

Given where transnational production and cinephilia stand today, can Latin American filmmakers afford not to issue pamphlets, in this sense? This question warrants its own essay, but mine will concern itself with what happens with when Latin America indulges in this stripe of illustrative cinema, as a condition to funnel through the transnational festival circuit and achieve global art house distribution. Occasionally, filmmakers from this region muster up the resources to produce non-pamphletarian cinema and instead promote discussions over aesthetics or even the human condition. In such cases, what are their chances of having their ideas being genuinely engaged with on a par with productions from the ideational center, mostly the Global North, and not just included for what I am calling representative capital?

These lines of questioning were catapulted by the glaring exclusion of the S&S 2022 poll which seems counter sensical in light of the region’s expressive festival inclusion and transnational production funding wins (Falicov, 2011; Ross, 2011; De Valck, 2016; Vallejo & Peirano, 2022) since the late nineties. S&S’s increased relevance is due to the fact that a lot of revenue, from streamers’ selections, for example, will be informed by it, supported by viral gestures of fandom, as illustrated below.

Consequently, an exclusion from the list can arguably result in hindered film visibility and filmmaker viability.

 Long before these films can stand the chance of being canonized, they must obtain production funding, secure a preferably A-list festival premiere, gather reviews that will generate a marketing context for them, and, finally, attain a distribution or licensing deal in order to circulate. Festival going audiences are a smaller, select group, while streamers and press readers largely outnumber them, which compounds the stakes of the S&S 100 exclusion.

Extending the range to the 250 films in the poll, the topmost five Latin American films attest to a female bias (Paiva, 2022) –three of them by Lucrecia Martel (Zama, 2017; La Cienaga, 2001 and La Mujer Sin Cabeza [The Headless Woman], 2008), and one by Sara Gomez (De Cierta Manera [One Way or Another], 1977). While there have been strong intentions to be more inclusive in 2022’s poll (Brody, 2022; Jacobsen, 2022; Petkovic, 2022), somehow Latin America did not quite make the 100 cut.

The gap separating festival and funding favor from canonical inclusion, merits a twofold debate: first, to inquire under what auspices this regional production is being embraced within the festival and art-house circuit, and second, to articulate how inclusion and representation of Latin American filmmakers does not equate with actively contributing to central artistic dialogs. Latin America remains in the ideational periphery, even as it occupies more global screens, perhaps precisely because of the terms in which it secures its entry and plays into “the trap of representation.[i]” (Bird 2022)

Similarly to Martel’s hypothetical tourist, Manuel Betancourt speaks of a “cartographic impetus” (2011:263) on the part of festivals, as ideational centers, seeking out new territories and accumulating representative capital for their own benefit. Reinstating autonomy for filmmakers from “the Rest,” is a first step towards improving the terms of global inclusion. In considering curatorial and poll exclusions, we might outline the pitfalls of a reformist, symbolic inclusion, that is to say, representative capital amassing. The antidote would be a promotion of ideational horizontality, an extension of Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s (1994) polycentrism: an acknowledgement of multiple centers, instead of endowing some with parameters-setting privileges, while others are forced to adequate themselves.

A recent call for “provincializing” the hegemonic center (Chakrabarty, 2009) emphasizes the need to give the West some of its own medicine. Chakrabarty’s call, though well merited, stands in sharp contrast to where the film industry is headed, given the widening dominion of mainstream content producers (Leal, 2023), and their cultural insensitivity. Case in point, the 2023 summer release conflation of Barbenheimer (Dooley 2023), which minimized the real-life human toll suffered by Japan, in rolling up Oppenheimer (Nolan 2023) with the glibness of the Mattel intellectual property vehicle (Barbie, Gerwig 2023)—the latter, released days after the 78^th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. To give a better sense of scale of this hegemony, Claudio Leal (2023) laments that out of 3.401 Brazilian screens, Barbie alone occupied 2.056 in its opening weekend.  Aided by the rescinding of national quotas, such releases amount to “scandalous concentration” and a “colonization of the imagination.” (2023 translations my own [TMO]). Independent productions have no such power to overwhelm the distribution circuit in this scale, in Brazil and elsewhere, yet, they are also playing a part towards Leal’s global colonization of the aesthetic imagination, through means which I will continue to explore in this article.

While the desire to be inclusive is patent in the 2022’s poll, the exclusion of Latin America provides indications for needed decolonial work ahead. Before delving into this symptomatic exclusion, it seems pertinent to inquire into what gets projected onto lists, and what their shortcomings might be. Nicolas Prividera (2022) reminds us that every selection implies exclusions, and that the measuring stick used ought to be more transparent. Indulging in list-making seems like a harmless exercise, mostly serving fandom clamor. However, in addition to my earlier mention of streaming revenue and circulation, Elena Gorfinkel (2019), critiques lists by claiming they only perpetuate an uneven playing field. I highlight a few lines from Against Lists, which seem particularly relevant to this essay:

“Lists are attentional real estate for the fatigued, enervated, click-hungry.”

“Lists aggregate the already known and consolidate power.”

“But in this hyper-mediated moment, the recirculated compulsory form of the list – list as desiderata of consumption, a grocery receipt of your watching – has become an instrument of commodity fetishism, of algorithmic capture, of priapic, indulgent self-exposure. Look closely. Who exactly produces this flurry of lists? “

Gorfinkel frames such lists as another stage for hegemonic forces, which seizes global theaters and the ideational field, to play out. In addition to muting peripheric voices, lists set in motion the shallowest form of engagement: list comparisons. When S&S released the voter ballots, claiming the spirit of transparency, a furore of comments followed (Edelman 2022, Tobias 2022), making it clear that while some took this as an opportunity to push certain agendas, they are far outnumbered by those who listed to attest to a pedigree of sorts, to reassure themselves and others that they were drinking from the good sources.

 The omission of Latin American films not only fails to fetch more viewers, but suggests that their inclusion, beyond the 100 top films, might not necessarily merited, but a gesture of good will on the part of the center. In the captures below, researcher Sebastian Gonzalez Itier and film critic Carlos Aguiar, comment on the Eurocentrism inherent in this poll exclusion.  Itier employs an implicatory tone while Aguiar lets on a wistful affect. Both “provincialize” and problematize European incuriosity and point to the misguided benevolence.

“There’s lots to be discussed and thought about this, but the omission of Latino filmmakers and films speaks of an ignorance on the part of European cinephilia, which @SightSoundmag and @cahierscinema, among others, proudly promote.” (TMO)

            For context, the British Film Institute has indeed made efforts to amplify their voter base: in 2002, it consisted of 145 lists by critics, in 2012, 1000 lists by “critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles“(James 2021), and in 2022 it grew to 1600 lists, aired out by hired consultant Girish Shambu (Ruimy 2022) to be a more inclusive voting poll.

            Despite these efforts, a more radical problem emerges: the ballots of many Latin American critics and directors reveals that they seldom include regional contributions and seem poised to look North for filmmaking excellency. While it is unquestionable that Europe and the U.S.A. have meaningfully contributed to the canon, as this poll has historically attested, inquiring into the low count of Latin American films by nominated participants from the region might be read in three ways: as internalized Eurocentrism, as proof of weak intra-Latin American filmic circulation (Gutiérrez, 2017), and as a symptom of the transnational funding mechanisms. My inquiry probes the latter and will start by analyzing the film festival circuit, its associated funding schemes, and their criteria, as the primary instance of gatekeeping which leads to circulation in arthouses and beyond.

In addition to validating new productions and filmmakers, festivals also help solidify the canon by celebrating film classics and archives. The canon, as it finds expression in surveys like S&S’s, will compete for “attentional real estate” in an increasingly fragmented contemporaneity. From specialized streaming services like Mubi to tracking and notating apps like Letterboxd, tastemakers have the ample permeability of social media at their fingertips, giving the canon increased reach.

Canon Building: Festivals, Funds, and their Stakes

Festivals, as the point of ingress to the public, have been described as: “reducts of cinephilia” (Ikeda, 2021:188), “the exposure system of the film industry” (Campos 2015:106), a site for the writing of film history (Stringer 2001) while some go as far as to call it the “festival industrial complex” (Shellenberger 2022).  Another relevant aspect, which Brazilian researcher Marcelo Ikeda brings up, is that while festivals “compete among themselves for visibility, with the presence of films and personalities, and for financing of such events, they also have come to form a coherent network with its own implicit rules.” (2021: 187, TMO).

Miriam Ross affirms this network cannot be circumvented by Latin American filmmakers insofar as, even when they dispense with festival production funds, they simply cannot afford to sidestep the visibility and distribution contacts that festivals enable. Festival buzz is in a capacity to generate “indie blockbusters” (Elsaesser 2005) giving festivals the power to add value to a film, effectively creating an injunction to “enter into transcultural contracts that are determined by the power that festivals hold over the global film circuit.” (Ross 2010:14).

Federico Adorno’s opinionated editorial “Talk to Me About Colonialism! Notes from a Place of Resentment” (2022, TMO) provides one concrete example of how this unfolds for Latin American filmmakers, like himself. Paying multiple submission fees in euros, money hard earned in Paraguayan currency, is a hard endeavor that calls for resources (command of English included) and resolve. The eventual standardized letter of rejection arrives, stating they’d be happy to see his future work. Adorno quips that there won’t be a future film unless he can secure a decent international premiere for the current one.  Besides, he reports that the film’s link was not accessed on his Vimeoaccount, according to regional traffic data reports, which contributes the resentment in the title of his piece. This op-ed attests to how flawed the submission process is and what the hurdles before peripheric filmmakers are.  To succeed, they need significant funds, personal connections and to adhere to certain curatorial precepts, which I will address in my discussion of funding criteria, as the two seem closely matched.

It would be shallow to portray this costly, pro forma submission as the outcome of malicious intent on the part of festivals, most are currently underfunded and understaffed[ii]. Along with the consequences of labor precarity, currency disadvantages not being accounted for in the application process disproportionately affects filmmakers from the Global South and deepen the divide.

Having made themselves powerful and unavoidable, these networks keep expanding in directions that call for a thorough reevaluation of their methods and procedures, which have backfired in the form of scam festivals (de Valck, 2023; Kilkenny 2022)[iii], and abuses of curatorial power (Felizardo, 2020)[iv].

On a more positive note, festivals have also come to cater to niches audiences, and responded vigorously to world events such as the 2020 pandemic, providing a sense of community to many. The plasticity of festivals attests to their need to adapt to stay relevant. One such evolvement is their role with makers from the Global South on two fronts: funding schemes and professional formation mechanisms.  Both often require English fluency, come with several strings attached and require projects to pass through their selection criteria. Such criteria is inevitably traversed by power dynamics and undercurrents of the dominant acculturation agents, as is the case with film selection.

As a first instance of value attribution, film festivals are neither a neutral, nor transparent forum, much like canon drafting. Going back to the effort to make sense of the S&S 100 exclusion of Latin America, it’s important to highlight how this exclusion clashes against Marijke de Valck’s findings that upwards of 45% of the Hubert Bals fund (henceforth HBF) goes to Latin America (2013:52). Taken together, festival funding abundance and canonical irrelevance, arguably amount to a performative patronage: an inclusion of representations of the region that does not cohere with consideration as expressive aesthetic proponents. This inconsideration suggests that rhetorical decolonial gestures are made, but still leave peripheral players at the margin of ideational dialogs.

Out of a belief that the voters were genuine within, not so much their field of vision, but certainly their field of valorization I reject the term tokenism here. Instead, I favor Adam Phillips (2019) nesting concept that acculturation organizes our desire, and desire organizes our attention. Therefore, it behooves us to remain aware of how the dominant culture shapes global taste, and the desires and demands it generates.  Such strictures get reflected into our canons and festival accolades. I also risk the hypothesis that this circuit demands representation and inclusion, while desiring centrality and stake holding. This disconnect between representative politics and reinstatement of ideational centrality is the crux that the project of “provincializing” Europe should take on if it is to abet the situation for peripheric filmmakers, by affirming polycentrism.

Cornering Authenticity as Colonial Praxis

 Scholarship on film festivals has expanded considerably and one of its most consequential findings is that “the industry has replaced the filmmaker as the festival’s premiere stakeholder.” (de Valck: 2013:40) This industry, centered in the dominant acculturation agent of the Global North, dictates that to even stand the chance of securing domestic and theatrical distribution (Campos 2015) Latin American cinema must first land in this circuit. Many productions don’t and come to constitute a “festival film” which only recovers some of its costs through screening fees and awards gained in this circuit. To maximize festival participation, it is fundamental that these productions “comply with cosmopolitan standards” (Falicov 2010:5).

These standards have encroached upon this cinematic productions’ very incipience, in the form of production funds, script and directing labs. Spreading their manifold area of influence into how global art films are made (De Valck 2013:42), effectively forming a “parallel industry” (Oubiña 2009:18), they frequently demand the triptych of “authenticity,” “local roots” (de Valck 2014) and that these films be shot in the region, as if filming outside of the director’s native soil escaped the filmmaker’s mastery. The latter criterium going against global trends of migration and erasure of boundaries.

The Sundance Labs, the Berlinale Talents Program, the Locarno Industry Academy, and other training events, are heavily attended by Latin American filmmakers, and form a circuit of knowledge sharing and networking opportunities (Falicov 2010, Ostrowska 2010, Ross 2011). Participating increase chances of festival inclusion, besides, as an industrial art form, film necessitates resources that are currently mostly available through transnational co-productions, so sitting out this circuit is detrimental.

A less conducive outcome is that pre-production involvement in transnational films confines authorial voice, to appeal to global audiences, by making them more universally palatable and understandable to a large potential market (De Valck, 2013, Falicov 2010). Sembene dealt with the need to be understood abroad in reception, Adorno in securing festival entry and Martel in pre-production, as stated earlier.

The problematic assignation of “local roots,” by an Eurocentric gaze, is elusive, and not just for Latin America. Carina Bernasconi’s study (2023) reports how Iranian cinema was framed and propped up by the festival circuit. Ali Abassi, the Iranian director of Holy Spider (2022) and Danish resident, raised the majority of the funding for this production in Scandinavia, and nevertheless, his film ended up labelled of Iranian origin. When announcing it as a Cannes selection, the head of the festival Thierry Frémaux referred to Abassi as a “Swedish-Iranian” director, possibly harking back to the fact that Abassi’s prior film Border (2018), was shot in Sweden. “The implications of a decentered gaze are not discussed,” (2023:3) Bernasconi remarks. She makes a strong case for how the “Iranianess” of this film became a selling point towards festival inclusion and plaudit. Abassi distanced himself from Iranian cinema at the Cannes press conference thusly: “cinematically speaking I don’t feel at home in Iranian cinema and that’s because everything is so fucking(sic) metaphoric.” (Bernasconi, 2023:4) At the end of the screening, Abassi exclaimed “It’s a great day for Iranian Cinema!” (Bernasconi 2023:4).

Director and audience are aware of what is expected of him, and he chooses to perform the Iranian director, or not, taking on the burden of representation[v] to his advantage. Ostensible national discourses are hence produced at and for Cannes. After all, Bernasconi claims that Holy Spider is ultimately intended for the Western spectator (2023:5), and evokes Andrew Higson’s central question “What is a national cinema if it doesn’t have a national audience?” (1989:36) Unlike the Iranian situation where films, such as Holy Spider, featuring overt violence and sexuality wouldn’t be screened, what prevents Latin American films from being more widely seen at home is the market economy of hegemonic dominance. The astonishing fact that the Barbie release occupied approximately 80% of Brazilian screens, justifies Leal’s call for more quotas for national cinema. While he condemns such colonialist hegemonic imports, I’d like exploring how exports are equally vulnerable to a very resilient incuriosity and cunning colonialism. Mark Fisher (2009) and Ani Maitra (2020) use “cunning” when referring to a capitalism that thrives in co-opting counterculture (as independent productions were once considered) to remain firmly in place. Selection criteria, therefore, constitutes a vehicle for colonial reinstatement.

Without selling multiple territories these small films cannot break even, so they must reach wide as the film market is not exempt from the market logic of profit. Ariella Aisha Azulay (2019), however, defends a resistance to voracious imperialist expansionism. This defense supports the need for a divestment from ample distribution horizons as proof of relevance, for peripheric filmmakers. Martel’s encouragement to make films for one’s neighbors, not for a whole empire, aligns with such a directive. Together, streaming viewership tendencies, canonical recognition, festival, and funding schemes coincide in favoring a certain stripe of Latin American production, artifacts with ample spectatorial reach, which complicates how the periphery self-assigns artistic autonomy. Providing glocalcommodities[vi] constitutes a double bind, first pointed out by de Valck (2013:46): peripheric filmmakers must present locally rooted, production location restricted films, that are considered “authentic,” as dictated by selection committees from the dominant acculturating center.

Before expanding on the verifiability of such an “authenticity”, I will address shooting location within the birth country of the filmmaker, as criterium. Lucio Castro’s Fin de Siglo (2019), where an Argentine filmmaker places a story in Barcelona, or Brazilian Karim Aïnouz’ Algeria based Mariner of the Mountains (2021) are ruled out of HBF funding, for example. Uprootedness and migration have long been a pillar of the Global South’s experience and having those stories foreclosed comprises another instance of erasure and incuriosity.  Global South filmmakers end up confined to the pedagogical mission of providing the center with images and narratives of the periphery. But only those that fit their mold of authenticity, frequently one that reassures the center about its better developed state.

Regional shooting requirements might trickle down funds to more local industry professionals.  Yet, I fail to see how an increasingly mobile and boundary fluid world, shouldn’t be mirrored in funding policy. Which is how a film like Castro’s, about two errant characters, ends up being self-funded. Even the stated intention to invigorate Southern media industries, does not entirely hold up, as many co-production funds require that a certain percentage of the budget be spent in the country of co-production. Hence, these ostensible forms of foreign aid[vii] directly benefit the European film industry (Campos 2015:101).

While Fin de Siglo does little to illustrate Argentina’s colonial past, or dictatorship, nor displays the dazzling landscapes of Patagonia or the Pampa regions, it is a riveting drama broaching topic of universal reach: the short-shelf life of erotic desire, and the conflicting drives to err and to belong. Wide-spanning themes aside, Castro’s film employs an unorthodox temporal structure which upends narrative conventions in riveting ways.  Numerous positive reviews (Dry, 2019; Aguillar, 2019; Goldstein, 2019; Kenny, 2019; Uhlich, 2019) frame his formal irreverence as poignantly subversive. Still, its modest circulation in the festival and art-house circuit, might be credited to how poorly it accounts for Argentina.

I’ll further problematize “authenticity” with one illustrative anecdote which highlights the consequences of Martel’s mediatic tourism. Brazilian filmmaker Andrea Seligmann Silva[viii] showed her awarded short film, Aonde São Paulo Acaba [Where São Paulo Ends] (1995)— about an aspiring hip hop singer from the outskirts of São Paulo— to her instructor Spike Lee in class at New York University. She was dealt a thorough scolding for, according to him, Brazilians should make films about samba, their legitimate musical production, and not copycat from the U.S.A. This episode confines the filmmaker to one admissible cultural production, samba, and enforces that peripheric filmmakers are not welcome to join non-territory specific discussions. Further, Lee’s reprimand ignores the fact that it is not only individuals who have become more mobile, but artistic productions as well. Rather than be curious about how hip hop got reconfigured in Brazil, Lee instead, discounts Brazilians as incapable of ingenious transformation, to frame them as mere copycats.

Separately, Lee’s comment glosses over the fact that Brazil has a myriad of musical traditions, all of them harking back to some immigrant or foreign influence: samba (Western Africa), maxixe (Polish Polka), forró (African Lundu and first nations Tupi Guarani). Cultural critic Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes’ repeated assertion that” In Brazil, nothing is foreign, because everything is foreign,” (Silva, 1990) arguably tears Lee’s critique asunder, and complicates any purist notion of authenticity, such as those upheld by festival funds. Like Brazil, many other countries from the Global South often have their myriad cultural productions boiled down to one salient manifestation, whichever got the most international projection.  This inconsideration of their variety, range, and richness, all of which collectively endow the region with generative potency and creative capital, seems disingenuous. The extent to which recognition of polyphony is denied (Stam and Shohat 1994), in a failure to represent peripheric groups in all their breadth, its productions are kept in the register of allegory, where narrow representations are expected:

The view of the nation as unitary muffles the “polyphony” of social and ethnic voices within heteroglot cultures […] the precise nature of the national “essence” to be recovered is elusive and chimerical […] national identity is mediated, textualized, constructed, ‘imagined,’ just as the traditions valorized by nationalism are “invented.” (Shohat and Stam 1994:286)

The arbitrary construction of national traits and the elusiveness of essence chimes with Argentine writer and filmmaker Cesar Gonzalez (2021) assertion that marginal characters are seldom endowed with more subtle affects like ambivalence, desire, envy, and instead are often reduced to one layer, a single story-serving purpose, and I add, to produce a construction that attends to the demands of dominant acculturation.

Stephanie Dennison states that while there are many films that create heightened national allegories, with positive and negative connotations, peripheric countries have more to lose as they simply do not have enough positive representation and recognition at large.  That is to say, while James Bond standing in for Cool Britannia, is as reductive as Borat standing in for Kazakhstan (Charles 2006), in an unleveled playing field, “reputation management” (Dennison 2021:42) is more consequential to the periphery.

This incuriosity into the complexities of the Global South’s cultural productions, reducing them to easily identifiable categories, “samba” for one, resonates with Phillips (2013) reminder that curiosity is never evenly spread out across a whole landscape of possibilities. It isn’t any different in the geopolitics of transnational cinema. Curiosity is topographically invested into the peaks, upon which Western self-assigned centrality seems installed, leaving entire valleys abandoned to incuriosity. This arbitrariness of authenticity implicates the film festival fund benefactor, as Brazilian critic Fabio Andrade (2023) reminds us, we have yet to hear of what comprises an authentically white or European film.

Reckoning with the historic-political dimensions to the asymmetry of the benefactor-beneficiary relationship in the chain of festival-funding, inclusion and distribution is bound to give us a better understanding of Latin America’s canonical irrelevance.  This is after all” a decision-making flow, initiated by the first world and accepted by the third world, a flow which characterizes many postcolonial relations” (Ross 2011:266). The effect of the burden of representation (of authenticity) befalls on the periphery and is enforced by the demands of the ideational center.

Prurient Illustration as Price of Admission

It must be acknowledged that Latin America was put on the festival map by a history of overtly political film movements, like Cinema Novo, Third Cinema and associated new waves, flaunting Latin America’s “poverty.” What followed this boom is categorized by Paul Rodriguez’s (2012) as melorealism— “no longer epic, spectacular, or revolutionary, but rather intimate, realist and ultimately, reformist […]”  (2012:108). Counter to Rodriguez’ description, Latin American filmmakers and scholars argue for a cinema that continues to be political by other means:

We do not believe reality is already constructed and that there is nothing else for us to do but accept it.[…] This focus on perception, on trying to see and discover little details of reality, that has nothing to do with an intimate and personal world, instead it is a lot closer to a political posture towards reality, seen as something that can be transformed (…) Film gives filmmakers and fieldworkers the chance to use audio-visual narratives as a tool to deconstruct perception and this is a political action.

                                                                                                                        Lucrecia Martel[ix]

Critiquing notions of what is authentic or political, is essential towards the goal to invigorate autonomous ideation in the periphery. Filmmakers who go against pedagogical tendencies, like Martel, or the members of the El Pampero collective, unsettle traditional political categorization, yet Alejandro G. Iñarritu affirms, distribution has yet to evolve to meet this level of talent (Gutierrez 2017:89). Circulation does not warrant the recognition of ideational legitimacy. Iñarritu’s statement speaks to my question about the grounds upon which Latin American films can be considered canon-worthy and by whom. We know the S&S’s voter pool to be diverse in composition, but within the range of professional curators, directors, and critics. Betancourt soberly defends that existing “outside of the cinephile echo chamber of festivals and film journals will depend on more attention being paid to the role of audiences” (2016:15), to define Latin American cinema outside of a system that would” […] limit it to curiosity worth dissecting, a new colonial window into the region.” (Betancourt 2016:15). While being more inclusive of audiences bears no guarantee of canonical inclusivity, framing publications, and festivals as an echo chamber, where a single belief system gets affirmed, is coherent with the Global North’s industry being the primary stake holder of this confining demand for “authenticity.” The cunning lies in being inclusive to keep the North’s place of ideational centrality intact.

While it is reasonable that “sociopolitical issues which transcend the cinematographic field.” (Ikeda 2021: 187) – immigration, clandestine drug trade, unemployment, poverty, child labor and prostitution (Jenkins 2018) — must find cinematic expression, their restrictive association with a supposed Global South authenticity turns coercive, the minute it becomes a condition for entering the filmic circuit. Martel does not problematize the existence of Hollywood, but its ravenous hegemony (Rua 2020), similarly, I do not problematize the existence of social realist films but question their prominent projection. Look no further than the curiously indexical recent titles Argentina, 1985 (Mitre 2022) and Chile’76 (Martinelli 2023), mining abject chapters of the dictatorship in both countries, as they adhere to established formulas of cinematic storytelling and remain firmly anchored in the personal trajectories of their protagonists.

This over representation of social issues comprises, in Bordieuan terms, a “universe of belief” (1996), which bleeds over surveys like S&S 100, and affirms underdevelopment as unsurpassable. Gonzalez’ coinage of marginality fetishism (2021) is predicated on two notions: that marginality is a commodity and that “poverty seduces and ultimately, proves the ideal scenario upon which other actors can project the phantoms that harass them daily.” (2021:6, TMO) Marginality fetishism denotes an implicatory projection in the West’s demands for a prurient “authenticity”.

The strings attached to festival funds reinforce a “developing world mode of being” (Ross 2011:264): an expectation that poverty and precarious conditions always be associated with this cinematic production (Gutierrez 2017, Betancourt 2016) when the reality is far more nuanced. Brazilian economist Edmar Bacha coined the termBelíndia “a tiny, rich Belgium surrounded by a vast, poor India” (The Americas 2017) to describe Brazil, which highlights the potential and capacity for prosperity. Yet the “Belgian” facet of the region simply does not gather much traction on transnational screens.  Proof is in the fact the vast majority of the S&S 250’s selections displays some “Indian” aspects of this descriptor. As polyphony gets muffled in the name of salient representations (of underdevelopment), the periphery dims out. Left to festival funds policies, this will continue to be the case, as its criteria rejects films that are simply not interested in overtly social, economic, and political dimensions, but may have a wealth of psychological, aesthetic, or philosophical propositions, in sum, the films that reject the burden of representation.

            In addition to these burden-enforcing criteria, de Valck’s case study of the Rotterdam Film Festival (2013) raises another under-acknowledged aspect of this transnational circuit: she rightfully points to a two-way flux for Latin American filmmakers. They benefit from the support of the HBF, the development award hosted by Rotterdam, but also endow it with a certain level of festival prestige:” Artistically, the fund desires to operate autonomously and to pick the most promising projects — many of which originate from Latin America, the region that helped establish its reputation” (2013:55). The under exploration of this aspect—a two-way flow where Latin American filmmakers conferred prestige to a now reputable festival and are not just passive recipients—seems to unfold into the S&S 100’s exclusion: gaining little credit for their role in the evolution of cinematic forms and festival culture.

In offering the coinage representative capital – whereby Latin Americans confer value upon the festival with productions that uphold its inclusiveness and relevance – to complement Manuel Betancourt’s idea of a cartographic impetus, I concede that this seems less important in canon drafting than it does in festival inclusiveness. This may trace back to the afore mentioned association between festival funding as foreign aid (de Valck, 2007), an incumbence which does not befall on S&S’s poll.

 

Towards a Decolonization of Distribution and Reception

 

 While festivals have never been a pure forum of aesthetic debates, they “stimulate a reverberation of the films among opinion formers” (Ikeda 2021: 186, TMO), generating buzz and ancillary promotional media for social platforms[x]. Some writers claim their consecration is not necessarily tied to their commercial viability (de Valck 2007, Elsasser 2005), which Ikeda, writing from the perspective of a South American, sees differently: “[…] debates about aesthetic matters end up having repercussion on commercial aspects, given that the films which resonate the most within the festival event have the higher probability to reach a larger number of markets.” (Ikeda 2021: 186, TMO). The time gap between articles (2005, 2007-2021) may well signal a change in the commercialization of art-house films, yet it seems easier for European researchers to validate art for art’s sake, than it is for a Brazilian writer or Paraguayan filmmaker to disregard commercial distribution and critical reach, aided by festival endorsement.

Premières are another strategic aspect of a film’s commercial career; thus, many festival funds also require privileges (Ross 2011:266, Campos 2015:102), and discourage debuts from happening at possibly more prestigious events, in another instance of festival self-validation. Ross adds that “it is hard to escape the view that third-world countries are producing cultural artifacts for their first world benefactors” (2011:267).

Domestically, Augustin Mango and John Hecht (2016) articulate the paradox of the Latin American film industry which simply cannot compete with Hollywood productions at the box office, even after it manages to somehow thrive in the festival circuit.  These cultural artifacts start looking like extractivist proceeds from this angle, given the asymmetry of the transaction. Except what these commodities provide is not intrinsic value, it is representative capital, conferring the celebratory gloss of inclusivity upon festivals and their funds.

There is, however, cause for optimism in a rising wave of alternative models for bridging Latin America to the global art-house market: from Pablo Larraín’s or Iñárritu’s alternance between American and home-based projects, to cooperatives like Brazil’s Filmes de Plástico or Argentina’s El Pampero. The latter has produced uncompromising films that reject the call of tropism, on multiple levels. Take for instance Trenque Lauquen (Citarella, 2022) or La Flor(Llinás 2018), both offer entirely divergent narrative paradigms by taking huge liberties within genre convention, but also, by the very nature of their sprawling four- and fourteen-hours duration, respectively. Such running times pose a challenge to an already struggling art-house circuit, at a post-pandemic moment.

Whether using duration to affirm creative autonomy or to invite viewers to dedicate a meaningful span of time to a contemplative state, El Pampero invites a very different experience from the sightseeing in and out, to use Martel’s analogy. Rethinking their pathways towards reception, they forged a relationship with Buenos Aires’ MALBA Museum which welcomed screenings of work that was bound to be rejected theatrically or circulate very limitedly, within the arthouse circuit.

Counter to imperialist expansionism of Barbie scale, El Pampero achieves a far more sustainable scheme as described by filmmaker Matias Piñero: “They’re no box office blowouts, but each film allows for the next one to be made. They maintain a certain stability, a kind of ecology. As a filmmaker, how do you measure success? For me, it’s the ability to keep making films.” (Brodsky 2023) El Pampero sees honing one’s voice as a filmmaker as no different than being an athlete, one must practice regularly. Rather than spend years going through the mill of lab-fundraising-production-festival-circuit, they have opted for stringent budgets, always secured with no strings attached. Laura Citarella is adamant: “We do not submit to funds that are going to give us conditions or changes to the project, I’m not going to get tutored by someone I don’t know on my own script.” (Brodsky 2023)

El Pampero does not ignore the transnational arthouse circuit, as once proposed by Third Cinema, which might seem isolationist and not entirely feasible today, but they set a viable example for a more scrupulous engagement between center and periphery, and in so doing, open avenues for more self-ideation in the South, and for lessening the asymmetry of 

Conclusion

While representative capital ostensibly displayed may secure festival’s funding as a form of foreign aid, on the other hand, its role in canon building remains slippery. This decade’s poll gender and racial balance progress does not offset the conspicuous absence of a cinematic production which has consistently fetched awards and funds in the festival circuit and leaves us to conclude that the ideational sphere has never been so vertical. At least in its conception of itself.

The persistence of the question posed to Sembene and Martel — Are your films understood in Europe? — remains symptomatic of transnational dynamics that get routinely affirmed. Conversely, there are a theoretical and practical resistances to such dynamics. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s polycentrism opposes tropism, down to the abolishment of the terminology World Cinema, which in fact involves a discreet omission— (rest of the) World Cinema—that necessarily affirms a single Euro-centrality. Meanwhile filmmakers, like Citarella, are finding ways to engage with this circuit on new, less asymmetrical terms.

Martel could have easily settled into being fêted by this circuit, and instead she remains firm in her suggestion that filmmakers divest from pasteurizing their art to the point of it being universally fetching as pamphleterian commodities and compete with the ideational center’s amassing of representative capital.  The lopsidedness of being conditionally included without necessarily being contended with, is explicitly present in arbitrary, colonial-minded, criteria for funding and festival inclusion, and more diffusely on this survey’s exclusion.  Vaster transnational reach becomes hampered, as a consequence. While concerning oneself with the distribution of representative capital can be generally benevolent towards promoting more equity, stopping at that is indeed prejudicial. Such practices benefit the includer more than it affirms ideational horizontality to the included.

In order to deprogram Euro-tropism, decolonial labor is in order, so we can collectively undo the echo chamber effect, from festival cultures to canonical appraisal. A genuinely more inclusive circuit might involve decolonial practices, from within and without, such as El Pampero’s modus operandi, in the hopes of dispensing with shallow, simplified visions of what Latin America ought to be. This may start with acknowledging hip hop protagonists from the outskirts of São Paulo as legitimate reconfigurations in a transnational, de-centered world, and entirely abolishing a narrow conception of “authenticity” for Global South productions, since no one ever required, for instance, that every English film displays genuine proof of Britishness.

The S&S 2022 poll has proven changes are not only attainable, but desirable towards an ideationally affluent cinema. While I concede that any list or canon will necessarily make exclusions, hopefully the next decade will allow more room for non-pamphleterian cinema from the Global South.

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[i] Elena Lazic first coined this term, arguing that “increased presence on screens does not necessarily translate into larger creative power or salaries in front of and behind the camera, and in fact may hurt the fight for these rights as it dulls the motivation to fight for them.” Bird, Daniel. “The Representation Trap” Animus, June 29, 2022 https://animusmagazine.com/2022/06/29/the-representation-trap/

[ii] Independent film programmer Herb Shellenberger posts about work precarity in film festivals on twitter. Shellenberger. Herb [htshell]. Twitter, https://twitter.com/htshell

[iii] There are a number of scam festivals today, that collect submission fees, do not take place, and occasionally issue worthless lists of winners. Mentioned by Marijke de Valck at 20th NECS Graduate Workshop, Festival Cultures: New Ways to Study Networks, Circulation and Canon Production, February 15, 2023, Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Berlin.

Kilkenny, Katie, and Alex Ritman. “People Can Be Exploited”: How Below-the-Radar Film Festivals Prey on Struggling Moviemakers, The Hollywood Reporter, October 31, 2019 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/how-below-radar-film-festivals-can-prey-struggling-filmmakers-1250714/ Accessed February 1, 2022

[iv]  Gatekeeping seats of power, like any other instances of oversized power, open the door for abuse, as has been the unfortunate case of Brazilian programmer Gustavo Beck (Felizardo, 2020). He worked with the Rotterdam, Vienna and Bafici Film Festivals and was accused by 18 women of sexual harassment and usurping his position with promises of festival inclusion. While festivals responded strongly and swiftly to these accusations (IFFR, 2020), Policies to prevent a curator from working on so many festivals, creating a conflict of interest and an unwarranted accumulation of curatorial power, have yet to go into effect. Such abuses prove particularly hurtful to peripheric cinematic productions as accumulation of representative capital by festivals becomes de rigueur, in the current climate.

International Film Festival Rotterdam “IFFR’s statement on Gustavo Beck accusations” 31 August 2020, https://iffr.com/en/blog/iffrs-statement-on-gustavo-beck-accusations Accessed Jan 3, 2023

Felizardo, Nayara e Schirlei Alves “‘As mordidas foram profundas’” The Intercept Brasil 28 de Agosto de 2020 https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/curador-brasileiro-acusado-abuso-sexual/

[v] Term coined by Gil Branston to mean instances where artists are made to “stand in for their community and represent it in a certain way” Branston, Gill. Cinema and Cultural Modernity, Open University Press, March 2, 2001.

[vi] Paul Rodriguez defines glocal commodities as productions that are local in social landscapes, and global, by dealing in known genres, while remaining caught up in the flow of the dominant European and North American productions, like City of God (2002), or Identifying Features (2020).

Rodríguez, Paul A. Schroeder “After New Latin American Cinema” Cinema Journal 51, No.2, Winter 2012.

[vii] De Valck wrote on how the budget for the Hubert Bals Fund is derivative of the Dutch Foreign Relations office (2007). De Valck, Marijke. –. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam University Press, 2007.

[viii] As told to me in person on September 12th, 2022.

[ix] Originally in Spanish, translation my own. Gutiérrez, Carlos. ‘Cómo Latinoamérica pasó a ser un epicentro olvidado del cine internacional’. De Latinoamérica a Hollywood: Cultura cinematográfica latina en Los Ángeles, 1967-2017. Academia de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas, 2017:87.

[x] Festivals are generating media for archival and self-promotional ends which ranges from red carpet walks, Q&A’s, and press collectives. Shared over social media these exponentially raise a film’s potential for exposure.

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FILMOGRAPHY

Aïnouz, Karim. Marinheiro das Montanhas, Vídeo Filmes 2021

Castro, Lucio. Fin de Siglo, Cinetren, 2019

Gomez, Sara. De Cierta Manera. Instituto Cubano de Arte e Indústrias Cinematográficas (ICAIC), 1977

Llinás, Mariano. La Flor, El Pampero, 2018

Martel, Lucrecia. La Ciénaga, Cuatro Cabezas, 2001

—La Mujer Sin Cabeza, Aqua Films, 2008

—Zama, Rei Cine, 2017

Martinelli, Manuela. Chile ‘76, Magma Cine, 2023

Mitre, Santiago. Argentina 1985, La Union de los Rios, 2022

BIOGRAPHY

Karen Sztajnberg is a Brazilian doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam and working artist who first graduated from Bard College (Film, B.A, 1997), then Columbia University (Film M.F.A, 2006). Her research topic is audience engagement events of South American films in a transnational festival and arthouse context.

Recent conferences include New York University’s Windows, Frames, Mirrors Conference (2021), Visible Evidence, Frankfurt (2021), PILAS, Cambridge (2022) and REBRAC, Leeds (2022). She has also contributed articles to Mistral Journal, Free State Review and MAI Feminism.

Credited as director, editor, screenwriter, and video artist, her work has been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Lincoln Center Film Society, DocFeed, HotDocs, Visions du Reel, and in many art galleries, culminating in her solo exhibition at Appleton Square in Lisbon, Portugal.