A Work of Love?!

Book Review by Leung Wing-Fai

Jasper Sharp (2008) Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, Surrey: Fab Press

ISBN 978-1-903254 54 7 Paperback 416 pp

 

Even before opening the package that was Jasper Sharp’s Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, the weight makes the reader think that it is a more serious book than the tagline ‘Steamy, Subversive, Exotic & Bizarre!’ suggests. Despite Sharp’s admission that it is impossible to access many of the historical titles, the book seems as complete and encyclopaedic as it could be and I doubt that there is another bilingual list of Japanese sex films and relevant references quite like the appendices (that occupy over 60 pages). All of this, the writer tells us, is to explain what Japanese pink cinema ‘is’. The simple definition of pink cinema is softcore sex films, though pinku eiga is much more as Sharp’s passion will certainly convince and repay readers who persevere till the end.

In a strange kind of way, I find the non-pink bits more interesting as Sharp successfully narrates the social and cultural contexts for the development of Japanese soft porn. He also situates the pink industry alongside the mainstream and never loses sight of the parallel but intertwining larger film world in Japan and abroad. Indeed, many mainstream Japanese directors had cut their teeth or worked extensively in the pinku eiga industry: Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, 1997, Pulse, 2001) Hideo Nakata (Ringu, 1998) and Yoishi Sai (All Under the Moon, 1993). Indeed, the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign Film went to The Departures directed by Yojiro Takita who made the Molester Train series (1982-1984) among other pink titles. I am nevertheless not convinced of the writer’s inclusion of Nagisa Oshima whose main contribution to the debate is his controversial In the Realm of the Senses, 1976 (based on a ‘true crime’ story that had also sprung several pink films including Noboru Tanaka’s more conventional A Woman Called Abe Sada 1975). The inclusion of Oshima leads to another age-old debate of the art/sex film divide as many films of the early Japanese New Wave of the 1960s challenge sexual taboos given the more open social and moral attitudes of the time. I think this fluidity between experimental, New Wave, avant-garde, independent and sex films in Japan is certainly worth a critical evaluation. The cross-over of these strands in the industry is also something quite culturally unique that Behind the Pink Curtain serves to highlight.

A discussion of censorship has to be part of the history of sex film though Sharp never commits to some of the cultural issues that this raises. Sharp also comments on the wider feminist debates around pornography but remains neutral. Undeniably, pink movies are full of contradictions: the obsessive and repetitive depictions of rapes and tortures (the author describes these in length in chapter 12) are clearly part of the male fantasy element of soft porn. Equally there is no shortage of female audiences for such scenes. The author begins to acknowledge this unlikely section of consumers of porn towards the end of the book. I often find strong feminist messages in Japanese sexploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s (think Sex and Fury and Female Convict Scorpion series). Given most directors and writers of these films are male (a few female filmmakers do exist, as the author points out), the parallel feminist and sexist elements in many of these Japanese productions should enrich the existing debates about pornography.

Sharp’s admiration for key cult figures such as Koji Wakamatsu (who crossed the divides of avant-garde, pink and politics) and Masao Adachi (porn director turned Red Army revolutionary who spent 26 years in Palestine) is evident, devoting a chapter to each. On the other hand, I think Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno is worthy of a more detailed treatment than the slightly slim chapters 9 and 10. Roman Porno was launched by the flagging studio in 1971 and eventually generated 850 titles in 17 years. Other studios also jumped on the band wagon and produced a number of titles that might be grouped under the genre. The brand was loosely based on the French concept of roman pornographique or erotic fiction in the tradition of Marquis de Sade, The Story of O etc. The productions were more widely distributed, arty and influential than the old fashioned pink, almost edging soft porn towards respectability.

The later chapters see the author contemplate the decline of the whole softcore sex film market that was partly the result of competition from AV/Adult Video in the 1990s, younger generation of yet more experimental sex film directors (most notably Hisayasu Sato, The Bedroom 1992), gay porn, and the unlikely international film festival hit The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (Mitsuru Meike 2004).

Such a comprehensive history also inevitably leaves the reader feeling unfulfilled (sic.) as few films are available in the west or in Japan for that matter. The writer encourages us to think of the meanings of these films that majority of critics and scholars tend to dismiss but there are only so many pages of description of film ‘narratives’ one can read without losing the point altogether. After all, do we really need to know the finer plot of Apartment Wife Bondage and Sex Documents: Serial Rapists?

The comprehensive Behind the Pink Curtain demonstrates that the book is clearly a work of love for Jasper Sharp. Whether ‘the complete history’ of Japanese sex cinema or any other cinemas can ever be written and contained in one single volume is a moot point. Such a painstaking exercise is a timely reminder of the complexity of exploring the history of film production, mainstream or otherwise, past and present, in any given country. For that, we should salute this brave attempt.

Leung Wing-Fai is the co-editor with Leon Hunt of  East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film

24 Frames: books on regional cinemas (1)

The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, Gönül Dönmez-Colin (ed), Wallflower Press, London 2007, ISBN 978-1-9056-7410-7

‘24 Frames’ is a very welcome series from Wallflower Press that over the last few years has begun to introduce new audiences to films from ‘national and regional cinemas’ around the world. These are scholarly collections with 24 articles on individual films in each collection. The definition of a ‘regional cinema’ is always going to be arbitrary and the introduction to this collection by the editor turns the arbitrariness to the advantage of the book. On the one hand, the definition here of ‘North Africa and the Middle East’ includes three major film-producing countries, each of which deserves its own volume. On the other, there are good reasons, historical, political, cultural etc., why it is useful to group these cinemas. Commercially, the ‘region’ represents only a small part of the international film market, even though there are sizable local audiences and the potential for wider distribution. To illustrate the problem of definitions, the annual ‘World Film Market Trends’ publication, Focus (from the European Audio-Visual Observatory) includes all of Africa and the Middle East, but not Turkey. In this collection, Turkey is included, but not sub-Saharan Africa.

The Middle East is a highly problematic term that has arguably increased in usage with its importance as a concept in American foreign policy. The term was first popularised during the European colonial/imperial period, but then it referred primarily to Iraq and Persia/Iran. As a child, I remember the term the ‘Near East’. For the British, the ‘East’ began at Suez and the ‘Far East’ began at Singapore. India and Burma were the Raj. These are my memories of terms that lingered on after the Empire went. These terms at least had a (Eurocentric) logic that isn’t there in current usage. As Gönül Dönmez-Colin points out, the term ‘West Asia’ is sometimes used by Indian scholars and it does make more sense. Egypt and Turkey then conveniently straddle Asia and Africa/Europe respectively.

The region does not have a single language culture. Although Arabic, English and French are used extensively, Turkish, Hebrew and Farsi are distinctive language cultures. Religion and ethnicity are also mixed, especially in the littoral that the French used to call the Levant, with Lebanon and Beirut in particular celebrating diversity. This cultural mixing has contributed to several distinctive modes of film culture, both in production and in distribution/exhibition. The latter means that whilst some films from the region have been widely available in European and American specialised cinema circuits, others (generally those more popular with local audiences) have struggled to be seen outside parts of the region. There is now the beginnings of a Turkish popular cinema in limited distribution in Germany and other parts of Europe for the Turkish diaspora and also the possibility of Arabic-language films on satellite, but again these are unlikely to be seen by ‘Western’ audiences.

The difficulties of distribution mean that I have only seen three of the 24 films discussed in the book (although I have access to a couple more that I will get to eventually). It’s difficult therefore to evaluate the coverage of the diversity of material presented here. I can’t criticise a book because I haven’t seen the films, but the availability of films is an issue in opening up study. You can just imagine the headache the editor must have had trying to commission authors and titles, trying to represent an historical perspective and a spread across national cinemas, popular cinema and specialised cinema. For the record, the book has entries on four films each from Egypt, Turkey and Iran, four from the Maghreb (Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria) and seven from what was the Levant (Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine – several involving co-productions, often with France) with the last entry about an Iraqi film, Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs – The Iraqi Connection, produced from Switzerland and Germany. The only films made before 1970 are Ghazal Al-Banat (Candy Floss) and Bab El-Hadid (Cairo Station), both from Egypt in 1949 and 1958 respectively, the first representing the Egyptian studio system, the second Egypt’s principal auteur, Youssef Chahine.

I have seen two of the films in the last couple of years, Silences of the Palace (Tunisia, 1994) and Uzak (Distant, Turkey, 2002), so I’ll focus on the analyses of these two. Viola Shafik’s essay (10 pp with references) on Silences of the Palace proved invaluable in working on the film for a recent course. The film did very well on the festival circuit winning prizes and it received distribution in Europe. It tells the story of a young woman growing up in the ‘women’s quarters’ in a Bey’s house (Beys were the aristocratic rulers in Tunisia, granted privileges by the French colonial administrators) in the 1950s. The story is told in flashback by the central character who has become a cabaret singer by the 1960s. Shafik begins with a commentary on the film’s critical reputation and she points out that although revered in the West as an ‘art film’, partly because it deals with the position of women in Islamic society, it is in fact a skilful re-interpretation of a classical melodrama. Shafik then notes that in 1995, the film was distributed widely in the West but, apart from within Tunisia itself, it was not sold to distributors elsewhere in the Arab world (i.e. unlike popular Egyptian melodramas). She goes on to explore the complex set of theoretical issues around ‘popular’ and ‘art cinema’, the denigration of Egyptian melodramas, the subtle transformation of the genre in Silences, the ‘moment’ of liberation from colonial rule as represented in national cinemas etc. By providing useful specific cultural knowledge as well as contextualising insights, Shafik makes possible a much richer reading of the film.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan has ‘arrived’ in Europe and North America as an auteur, introduced outside the festival circuit by Uzak. In 2007, his position was firmly established by the critical reception to Iklimler. Uzak deals with the arrival in snowy Istanbul of a man from the rural hinterland. He comes to the apartment of his cousin, a photographer and very much the ‘metropolitan man’. The cousins have a very ‘distant’ relationship, exploration of which is the focus of the film. (The photographer is a typical character partly based on Ceylan himself.) S. Ruken Ozturk’s essay is just eight pages. Again, like Viola Shafik, she provides contextualising information about Ceylan’s earlier career, about the differences between Ceylan’s work and those of diaspora filmmakers such as Fatih Akin. She emphasises that Distant has been seen by far more cinemagoers in France (150,000) than in Turkey (60,000). What follows is again a rich reading of the film in terms of allegory and metaphor (Istanbul is a ‘distant place’ of 10 million souls caught somewhere between Turkey and Europe, the tale of the two cousins is played out in three scenes using a mousetrap – linked to the fable of the town mouse and country mouse) as well as in terms of a discourse of masculinity. I would have found this very useful after I’d first seen the film and again when I was teaching Iklimler.

If the rest of the entries are up to these two, I think that this will prove to be a valuable book. It has certainly encouraged me to think about hunting down more of these films on imported DVDs.

24 Frames: The Cinema of Central Europe, Peter Hames (ed), Wallflower, London 2004, ISBN 1-904764-20-7

The ‘naming’ of regions is also an issue in this collection. For far too long, the four countries of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic have been viewed as generally ‘East European’ and up until 1989 as part of an Eastern bloc dominated by Soviet Communism. As a result, the films have been viewed through a prism of ideological awareness – judged by the extent to which they have confirmed or resisted Soviet hegemony. But before 1939 ‘Central Europe’ was something of a powerhouse of artistic achievement deriving in part from the nationalist struggles of artists within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in the new nation states that followed the break-up of the Empire after 1918. In this conception, I would expect to include aspects of German and Austrian Cinema, but I’m sure they will be part of another volume (and in any case will have different kinds of concerns).

Peter Hames’ collection of essays covers the four countries and the films range from the 1930s to the mid 1990s with a perhaps understandable focus on the mid 1960s (the period of the Czechoslovak New Wave). Apart from some of the earliest films, most of the titles have been distributed in the UK and several are now available on DVD. These include films by well-known European auteurs such as Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, 1958 and Man of Marble, 1977) and Krzyzstof Kieslowski (Dekalog, 1988).

In this case, I have seen many of the films discussed and I have used material in the book on an evening class covering Central European Cinema. I found it extremely useful and I’d recommend it.

Contemporary European Cinema

Contemporary European Cinema, Mary P. Wood, Hodder Arnold 2007, £17.99, 200pp ISBN 0340761366

This is an important and timely book. Mary Wood attempts a great deal in a relatively short book. Inevitably, this means that the reader might sometimes be left wanting more, but that’s no bad thing if they have been introduced to a wide range of issues and given all the appropriate starting points.

Traditionally books about ‘national’ or ‘regional’ cinemas have focused on particular directors, film movements, specific genres and/or issues related to representations of national identity. In this process, popular cinema sometimes gets neglected because it is less often seen outside its domestic market, lesser-known directors and smaller producing countries are often missing altogether and distribution and exhibition rarely get a look in. In Wood’s book there are none of these omissions.

A quick run through the chapters will establish the book’s range. An overview of European production in terms of the international film market is followed by chapters on art cinema, the so-called ‘quality’ film, the attempts to match high concept Hollywood films and ‘popular films and local stories’. Issues of cultural identity are linked to the importance of television and satellite distribution. Two cultural issues are addressed in the question of ‘heritage films’ in ‘theme park Europe’ and the global/local issues of migration and multiculturalism. The book ends with a case study of a small European country with an interesting history and an important contribution to film culture – Ireland.

Mary Wood is Professor of European Cinema at Birkbeck and her specialism is Italian Cinema. This gives her a headstart in terms of knowledge about a major industry which has to some extent slipped off the radar of cinemagoers in the UK. She matches this with forays into Turkish and Balkan Cinemas and coverage of genres ranging from soft porn and gangster films to massively popular Spanish local comedies and children’s films from across Europe. It’s also good to see contemporary British Cinema discussed as part of European Cinema with Michael Winterbottom as auteur and British heritage films considered alongside those of France, Italy and Eastern Europe.

As well as the diversity of film culture explored, the book also delves into institutional questions and makes use of the wealth of European audio-visual data and reports which have been overlooked by many film studies academics.

At this point, I could register a small gripe about the book’s production. There are no illustrations apart from the various charts and tables (which I think could have been more attractively presented). I think a handful of good quality stills could have helped introduce some of the kinds of films not usually seen in the UK. Overall, the book feels crammed with small margins and a single column of text which is probably too wide for comfortable reading. I can only imagine that Hodder Arnold are trying to save money, but I think the design does a dis-service to the content.

Put the design points aside. If you want to reference European Cinema in your film or media studies teaching, you should definitely buy this book. It is written in an accessible style and crammed with information and ideas that students will find useful and it will introduce issues and case studies that might suggest unusual and rewarding critical research exercises. A detailed bibliography and index will help students get started.

Roy Stafford

An American Tragedy

Hollywood’s American Tragedies: Dreiser, Eisenstein, Sternberg, Stevens
Mandy Merck, Berg 2007.
ISBN 978 1 84520 665 9 Paperback, 171 pages, approximately A5, with some illustrations.

A book about an early 19th century novel, which judging by the library copy I borrowed is now little read, and two adaptations made in Hollywood more than fifty years ago sounds a little esoteric. But in its day the book was a best seller and very influential. Many critics and commentators also saw it as a compelling commentary on US society. Theodore Dreiser used a real-life murder as the basis for his plot of a young man who loves both a working girl and a rich socialite. Faced by the former’s pregnancy, he first tries abortion then killing. Dreiser maintained “it could not happen in any other country in the world”. Mandy Merck comments “the novel and its adaptations both constitute and are constituted by the convulsions of the nation state that is its protagonist and its theme”. The book is concerned with the sociology of the protagonist’s fate, not the drama.

Merck discusses in detail the origins of Dreiser’s novel, (written whilst he worked in Hollywood), and three film versions: one by Sergei Eisenstein, unrealised; one by Josef Von Sternberg for Paramount in 1931: and the most famous, directed by George Stevens for Paramount in 1951, A Place in the Sun starring Montgomery Cliff and Elisabeth Taylor. Merck points out in her introduction that she will study the authors, who include Dreiser, the directors who worked on the adaptations, and the economic authors, the Hollywood studios. She does this in an exemplary fashion, having clearly engaged in very detailed research.

So we get the development of Dreiser’s mammoth novel, running to 800 pages. Dreiser was an important contributor to a movement for realist fiction. He himself had researched the real-life love and affairs and subsequent murders that are the prime focus. He always carefully researched the places and people who fill his novels. H. L. Mencken commented, “When he sent some character into an eating-house for a meal it was always some eating-house that he had been to himself, and the meal he described in such relentless detail was one he had eaten, digested and remembered.” (Introduction to the 1948 edition). Another writer quoted in this volume opined, “No one else confronted so directly the sheer intractability of American social life and institutions, or … the difficulty of breaking free from social law.” (D. Denby in 2003).

The length and complexity of this novel made for a daunting adaptation. It was one of the projects worked on by Sergei Eisenstein when he sojourned briefly in Hollywood in 1929. Dreiser’s depiction of class divisions and his sociological standpoint clearly appealed to Eisenstein. He worked up a script for a 14-reel version. Merck studies this in detail, and it promised to be an intelligent and cinematic version of the novel. Dreiser certainly gave his approval. However, it did not get past the studio bosses, presumably made nervous by moral and red-baiting would-be censors. The author’s discussion is interesting in terms of his career, though I always wonder how either Eisenstein or his companions seriously imagined they could make a film in Hollywood.

The Sternberg version seems mainly to have been an attempt to recoup some of the costs by the studio. Sternberg was interested in illusion and artifice rather than realism. A quote by Selznick runs, “I don’t think he has the basic honesty, the tolerance, the understanding this subject absolutely requires, . . .” Moreover, the imminent arrival of Hollywood system of censorship, the Hays Code, made the explicit subject of the novel difficult. On completion, Dreiser was appalled at what his original had become, and undertook legal action, but he lost.

The post-war version that was very much Stevens’ own project. But Ivan Moffat complained, “Stevens was a romantic, so the bleak social picture painted by Dreiser took second place to the steamy love-affair between George and Angela” (the protagonist and his privileged amour). Certainly the film’s centre was the on- (and off-) screen romance: which I vividly remember from my younger film-going days.

All four versions of the story suffered from censorship and social outrage, since the original plot contained seduction, attempted abortion, murder and official corruption. Some of those involved in the 1950s version were also caught up in the HUAC’s attack on the Industry’s ‘liberals’. Merck spends time on these various social angles and their impact on the succeeding projects, and the overall discourse of book and films.

The book develops into a compelling and informative study of Hollywood and its relationship to US society and the wider world. At the end of the book Merck notes that 2005 saw a version of the original novel at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House: and a faintly disguised borrowing in Woody Allen’s Match Point. Even Jean-Luc Godard joined the act with a brief reference in Histoire(s) du cinéma. There is no mention of a planned new film version, which is a shame.

I certainly recommend Mandy Merck’s authoritative study. I also recommend Dreiser’s original An American Tragedy. The 800 pages do not seem so many when you get involved in the novel. Coincidentally, I have also recently re-read novels by Dreiser’s fellow realist, Upton Sinclair. So I am now resolved to read that other doyen of North American realism, Frank Norris. Hollywood famously filmed his McTeague as Greed (1923), with equally problematic results. The director was Erich Von Stroheim, who, along with Eisenstein, was one of the filmmakers preferred by Dreiser for his own epic work.

Studying From Russia With Love: Study Guide

Studying From Russia With Love, Will Rimmer, Auteur Publications, Leighton Buzzard 2008, ISBN 978-1-903663-78-3

I approached this Study Guide with some trepidation – I’m not a big James Bond fan and I’ve long thought the character an anachronistic fascist misogynist. I’ve tried to watch some of the more recent films, but apart from the impressive action sequences I can’t really see the point. But then, this guide is about the second Bond film – the one that most critics feel is the best of the series. And I remember seeing it on release as a young teenager in 1963, sitting in the first few rows of the ‘front stalls’ at Blackpool’s cavernous Odeon, then one of the largest cinemas in the UK. It was exciting then – I can still remember the credits and the theme music and quite a lot of the film’s action too. Since then, I’ve probably watched some sequences several times and recently I watched the whole film in what looked like a new print on ITV.

Because of these childhood memories, I was interested to see how Will Rimmer would handle the film. It isn’t clear exactly how he approaches it since there is no indication of which exam specifications are being addressed. Presumably A Level Film Studies is the main target as the guide provides ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ analyses (in terms of narrative, ‘film language’ and representation issues) and it attempts to set the film in the context of 1950s and 1960s British Cinema. (There are problems using the film for more than one purpose for A Level assessment – so check carefully.) It was indeed an optional ’set film’ for the FS3 Exam in Summer 2008, but by Summer 2009 the spec will have changed and study of this film would have to be fitted in to ‘Swinging Britain 1963-73′. This is touched on in the guide, but seems to me a tough call.

Will Rimmer has clearly taught the film (or other James Bond films such as Goldfinger) in the context of A Level Film Studies and I found it interesting to read comments by his students after a screening. The guide offers the analyses mentioned above and comes with eight classroom worksheets. All of these look fairly straightforward, although I’ve always doubted the usefulness of worksheets that you don’t devise yourself with a specific group of students in mind (but I know that this isn’t the modern way and that worksheets are sometimes a popular feature of guides). Slightly more problematic are the attempts to contextualise the film, both in production terms and in cultural terms.

I think the guide suffers from two factors beyond the author’s control. One is the constraint of space – a few pages only to discuss one of the major periods of British filmmaking – and the other is the tendency for contextual/conjunctural work of any kind at this level to be constrained by what teachers and students might have already seen or might have potential access to. It’s very easy to fall back on references to what are seen as historically important film movements, generally ignoring the mainstream commercial filmmaking of the period. Rimmer compounds the problem by relying exclusively on recent material on the Bond franchise and the social history of the period. I haven’t read Dominic Sandbrook’s history (Never Had It So Good, 2005) but it has generally had rave reviews. I’m also not familiar with Rimmer’s main source, Martinis, Girls and Guns: 50 Years of 007 by Martin Sterling and Gary Morecambe. I’m just surprised that he didn’t make use of the scholarly work of the 1980s on James Bond, first for the OU’s Popular Culture course (see Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. New York: Methuen, 1987) and later Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films by James Chapman (1999). (He does quote Chapman, but the reference is not listed.)

Rimmer does make good use of Christopher Frayling’s comments about the ‘consumerist’ appeal of Fleming’s character with his exclusive brand of cigarettes and his instructions about making a martini. He is also surely right to note that in 1963 From Russia With Love was still very much about an older generation and though the film was exciting, it wasn’t actually part of any kind of ‘youth culture’. Where he falls down is in the production background and the discussion of British Cinema generally in the period. Presumably as part of a ploy to attach the film to the beginnings of ‘permissiveness’ etc., Rimmer describes the British New Wave film movement of the late 1950s/early 1960s and conveniently slides it into the earlier non-commercial Free Cinema programmes of the earlier 1950s (I think this kind of shorthand is very misleading). These connections are justified by Bond producer Harry Saltzman’s background as producer for Woodfall Pictures on three of the more celebrated new wave films. Yet the real production context of the James Bond films derives from the ending of the Warwick Films partnership between Cubby Broccoli and Irving Allen – which had turned out various action genre films for Columbia in the 1950s – and Broccoli’s subsequent interest in the Fleming books which led him into a new partnership with Saltzman. Nobody pretended that Eon, as the new company was named, had anything other than a strict commercial interest in James Bond and the approach was significantly different from the ‘artistic’ ambitions of the new wave filmmakers.

From Russia With Love was in some ways ‘new’, but in most respects it drew on a long tradition of spy thrillers/romance thrillers, especially from Hitchcock. Connery was jolted into stardom by Dr No, but he wasn’t new (or ‘young’). Like Michael Caine in Zulu, Ipcress File and Alfie, Connery was a jobbing actor whose time seemed to have come. This was true of others in the cast as well. Rimmer recalls how he first came across Robert Shaw (the Bond villain/assassin in From Russia With Love) in Jaws. In 1963 he was well known to small boys as the dashing hero of The Buccaneers action series on ITV. The other two casting decisions that stand out are Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb and Pedro Armendariz as the Turkish agent. Lotte Lenya was best known as a singer, especially in relation to Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Pedro Armendiraz was a star of the popular Mexican film industry of the 1940s and 1950s who also appeared in Hollywood films. The strange casting of a Mexican as a Turk was of course standard for Hollywood (as was that of an Italian beauty queen as the Russian ‘honey trap’ agent and a Jamaican woman as a ‘Gypsy’ dancer) and it points to the production context in which this ostensibly British film was in effect an international production, set mostly outside the UK and bankrolled by United Artists. Rimmer picks up this facet of the production context in his discussion of the modern action picture genre but Alexander Walker’s account in Hollywood England (1975) is perhaps the best source here.

More worrying is the discussion of representation in this study guide, which seems to mirror the strange casting decisions. I have a problem here in that because I’m antipathetic towards the ideology of the film overall, I find it difficult to take Rimmer’s exploration of class, gender, age etc. seriously. He gamely goes through these issues but it is difficult to pin down how representations in the film are constructed and what they might mean. There is also the problem of sliding between the film and the book and between this single Bond film and the others that followed and the spy thriller genre films of the 1960s. I can’t really accept that the film is any kind of ’serious commentary’ on the Cold War, though it may be what some commentators have termed ’symptomatic’ of certain Cold War ideas. My only substantial quibble is with Rimmer’s analysis of the ‘Gypsy’ characters: “The girls dress in clothing appropriate for their culture, with an almost native, Girl Friday look about them, barefooted and bikini clad.” (p. 38) I would have thought it was more useful to question here the 1960s attitudes towards people who in Europe now are generally called Roma. As for the ‘native’ look and the standard Hollywood exploitation costume – how is this “appropriate for their culture”? Elsewhere, Rimmer does refer to the location of Bond films and the producers’ wish not to offend potential audiences. In this sense, choosing a transitory minority group to play a significant role makes some kind of sense.

In summary, I still find From Russia With Love to be an entertaining film, but I’m not really convinced by Will Rimmer’s analysis in terms of 1960s British Cinema or the political and social context of the period. In terms of ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ analyses of key concepts, I think he does a pretty detailed job and on that basis the guide may be useful for students and teachers.

Approaches to global cinema and global activism

Remapping World Cinema: Identity, culture and politics in film, Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (eds), Wallflower Press 2006, £16.99, 202pp ISBN 1904764622
Studying City of God, Stephanie Muir, Auteur 2006, £15.99, 56pp A4, ISBN 1903663598
Global, Activism: Global Media, Wilma de Jong, Martin Shaw and Neil Stammers, Pluto Press 2005, £16.99 234pp, ISBN 074532195X
Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (eds), Routledge 2006, £24.99 212pp, ISBN 0415371589

It’s interesting that first WJEC and then OCR have included references to ‘world cinema’ in their specifications. The term is also routinely used by media commentators and retail/rental outlets and I thought I was using it sensitively until I was ‘taken aside’ by my colleague Fai and disabused of that notion.

‘World cinema’ is, like ‘world music’, a term of exclusion and dismissal, defined only by what it is not: Hollywood. The cinema of Japan, India or China is as rich and diverse as American Cinema. It should be studied for what it is, not how it is defined by others. The latest edition of the OCR Media Studies A2 textbook, falls into the trap by defining ‘world cinema’ as anything that is not ‘from the US or UK’ (and that’s virtually the only guidance students get). In reality of course, for most Americans, if a British film isn’t distributed by a Hollywood studio and stuffed with recognisable Hollywood names then it is just as much ‘world cinema’ as a film from Hong Kong or Mexico. (Thus the subtitles for Ken Loach’s films made in the West of Scotland.)

All of this is a justification for the plea that all teachers of ‘world cinema’ should have a look at Remapping World Cinema (and some of the other texts referenced inside). This is a fascinating collection of diverse papers, well organised and presented with an excellent introduction by the editors entitled ‘Situating world cinema as a theoretical problem’.

This isn’t a book for A Level students (and I suspect some undergraduates might struggle with the range of material) but for A Level teachers taking a serious look at what they might be doing under the heading of ‘world cinema’, it’s a must. There are fifteen essays in total covering everything from gender and stardom to the concept of ‘crossing boundaries’. The two I enjoyed most focused on the two major crimes from my perspective, the obsession with defining the ‘Western’/’Japanese’ aspects of directors such as Kurosawa Akira and the very poor quality of writing about Indian Cinema outside certain academic departments. Kaushik Bhaumik begins his essay on Indian Cinema with an account of a Radio Times article in which a reviewer systematically rubbishes ‘Bollywood’ whilst admitting that he’s never actually seen a single film from Bombay.

City of God has been one of the most successful Brazilian films of recent years, capturing the attention of younger audiences worldwide. It’s exciting that work on the film has started to appear on A Level courses, but in view of the discussion in Remapping Cinema also worrying in terms of what kinds of approaches to the film might be taken. As is immediately evident from Stephanie Muir’s article in in the picture 54, Auteur have made a wise choice in choosing her as the author of their study guide to the film.

This is one of the best study guides that I have seen with a detailed discussion of the background of Brazilian cinema, culture and political history as well as the wider debate about ‘world cinema’ in a Latin American context. This allows the development of ideas about Narrative, Genre, Representation, Style and Audience Response (or ‘Macro’, ‘Micro’ and ‘Messages and Values’ as the WJEC spec. terms them) related to the film, which are both accessible to students and firmly grounded in terms of context. If you decide to work on this exciting film with your students, you would be foolish indeed to ignore this guide.

Where Remapping World Cinema draws together academics from different disciplines such as Modern Languages and Area Studies, Global Activism, Global Media draws together academics from different disciplines, media practitioners and political activists in a similar ‘interdisciplinary’ enterprise. This collection includes essays on specific political campaigns and how the media is used to communicate their ideas, as well as more contextual essays such as Colin Sparks’ on the ‘global public sphere’. The language is generally more accessible than in the other two collections here and the book would be useful for media teachers inspired to work on globalisation issues.

Transnational Cinema arrived too late for a full review, but it seems appropriate to include it here. Another collection of essays, this would make a good companion volume for Remapping World Cinema. As its title implies, this is more directly concerned with the dynamics of movements of peoples and ideas in relation to film culture. This is evident in the titles of the four sections in the book: ‘From National to Transnational Cinema’, ‘Global Cinema in the Digital Age’ (including Lord of the Rings and Star Wars) ‘Film, Migration and Diaspora’ and ‘Tourists and Terrorists’. This book will definitely be on my summer reading list and I’m already prepared for the DVD purchases that may be necessary.

Roy Stafford, June 2006

East European Film

Cinema of the Other Europe, The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film, Dina Iordanova, Wallflower Press 2003, £14.99, 224 pp, ISBN 1903364612
paperback.

‘East Central Europe’ in this book covers Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, though there are also brief comments on the other countries that once formed what was called the ‘Eastern Bloc’. The primary focus is the period from 1945 to 1989, with some discussion of the cinemas that preceded this period and also those that followed after that year of momentous change. It should be clearly said that this is an academic book. It is written and organised in the style and language of such works. It avoids the excesses of academia’s specialised language, though it does aim for that very exact, sometimes pedantic, style of description and comment. In most cases the writer is careful to explain specific terms, such as with ‘runaway’ productions, now commonplace in the area. These use local labour in the service of foreign finance.

The academic framework is also apparent in what is termed the discourse of the book. The topics and points of discussion and debate clearly refer to the preoccupations of scholars in Universities and similar institutions. This can make life difficult for a reader unfamiliar with such an approach. The subject also produces its own difficulties. As the writer concedes many of the films that are discussed in detail are little known in the West. It would be an impressive film viewer who has seen all the films dealt with in the volume. I, unfortunately, have not, but the book whetted my appetite to track down as many of these films as I can.

However, Iordanova does bring a detailed knowledge and understanding to the subject. The descriptions of both the industrial context and discussion of particular filmmakers are generally clear and informative. And both are placed in a context that is detailed and well presented. There are chapters on historical film and films dealing with identity, modernism and the position of women. And there are useful discussions of important cultural strands, for example, films that deal with anti-Semitism. The book points up both change and continuity in the region. Two factors among the latter are the major studios of Barrandov in Czechoslovakia and Babelsberg, once sited in East Germany. The later was earlier the home of the great UFA studio. Another is the continuing influence of surrealism in decades when in the west this had run its course. This influence also feeds into the important tradition of animation discussed in the volume. One virtue of the book is that the author deals with these Eastern European films and filmmakers to a great degree in their own terms. There is a serious engagement with the social and industrial context in these countries.

Having applauded this there is one odd weakness. The author uses a number of terms to categorise the societies under study, including ‘communist regimes’, ’state socialism’ and ‘totalitarian’. However, there is no clear explanation of the meanings attributed to these, though all have different and problematic usages. The closest to a definition is when the author takes the trouble to define Socialist Realism. This recognises that what we call ’socialism’ is a period of construction and transformation which, if successful, is followed by a communist state. It should be apparent from the author’s comments on the post-war settlement that led to these eastern European regimes that their socialist status was debatable. So, a clear discussion of what these terms mean is essential for clarity. The omission appears to follow from the terms of the academic debate into which the books falls. There seems to be little academic interest in understanding the political economy of either the Soviet State or of the members of the post-war Comecon. Yet the films themselves demonstrate that these societies and their regimes were never uniform in their policies or their relationship with the Soviet Union. Iordanova’s discussion of the Czech and Polish films, by for example Jaromil Jires or Andrzej Wajda, brings out clearly the differences in both their content and their standpoints. Whilst the political dimension needs development the book does offer a picture of the complexities of these films and film industries

(This review was first posted to the in the picture magazine website.)