MURAT AKSER  Kadir Has University, Istanbul
A festival for the labour: International Labour Film Festival as a cosmopolitan site of
resistance
In 2006 a travelling free-for-all film festival of labour-related films began in Turkey. The festival was
initiated by labour unions, particularly by SİNE-SEN, the union of Turkish film workers. The festival is a
free event that includes current labour-related films as well as films from the past. The inclusive nature
(women, LGBT, minorities) of the festival adds a further element of solidarity. The festival is also
decentralized as it travels to the remote industrial cities where there is significant labour presence. For the
last fifty years, the film festival structure in Turkey has been a for-profit, localized, celebrity-oriented,
capitalist media event that excluded active participation by citizens. This paper aims to explore the
initiation of a different kind of film festival in a Turkish context, one that is not-for-profit, international,
decentralized and labour/union operated. The International Labour Film Festival in Turkey projects the
possibility of another type of festival as a public service and creates a new area for the public debate on art,
labour/citizen action and alternative study of film by people.
JENNIFER BARKER  Bellarmine University
Cosmopolitanism and animated kinography
Dviga Vertov referred to his filmmaking style in Man with a Movie Camera as ‘an experimentation in the
cinematic transmission of visual phenomena … directed towards the creation of an authentically
international absolute language of cinema – absolute kinography.’ Such a kinography attempts to create a
language that overcomes national borders and linguistic barriers with a visual style of montage that is
globally accessible, but its nature as absolute embodies a cosmopolitan idealism that has been critiqued for
its reliance on universalist enlightenment ideology, and tends to undermine the ideal of inter-national
collaboration. This paper asks: is there, and should there be an ‘international absolute language of cinema’?
Can there be an international cinematic language that promotes a sense of global citizenship and
transnational understanding without creating reductive standardization? In answering these questions, I
examine Marjane Satrapi’s animated film Persepolis (2007). I argue that an international kinography can
exist in keeping with a new cosmopolitanism that is sourced in conversations about national and cultural
traditions, and which marks a continuing transitional state – one that is not based on images alone, as was
modernist montage, but rather on the juxtaposition and reinterpretation of specific historical moments,
cultural traditions and visual styles.
ERATO BASEA  Columbia University
How to find the C-spot: the cosmopolitan/cosmopolitical subject in the era of global crisis
The films of George Lanthimos (Dogtooth [2009], Alps [2011]) and Athena-Rachel Tsangari (Attenberg
[2010]) ‘travelled’ outside Greece, and received awards and critical praise around the world. Despite their
mobility across borders, these films are not transnational: they are Greek productions, with Greek stars and
filmed in Greek. Cosmopolitan theory, that dismantles the rhetoric of the local/global dichotomy, can help
us reconsider the films in a global(ized) context. First, it is argued that at the textual level (admitted
openness of narrative, aesthetic idioms used by renowned filmmakers), these films are embedded in the
intersections of the domestic and the global field of cultural production. Moreover, an exploration of
various avenues that informed them (interviews, reception, publicity) intends to show how these films were
defined in national and universal terms, and how this helped in the formation of their directors as
cosmopolitan subjects belonging to the world community of filmmakers. In the era of global capitalism, the
national makes a cultural product marketable (Negri). A working hypothesis is that these filmmakers were
placed inside the economic realities of crisis-ridden Greece to become marketable as Greek filmmakers but
also as cosmopolitan subjects who interrogate the geopolitical ethics of working under conditions of global
crisis.
LOUIS BAYMAN  University of Oxford Brookes
The haunted canvas: the picturesque in gothic horror
This paper seeks to investigate a striking trait of gothic horror: that alongside representations of abject
monstrousness, it creates fear from objects of beauty and longing, haunting characters with that which is
attractive to them. This paper will thus note the prominent role of portraits in the gothic. Using Nightmare
Castle/Amanti d’oltretomba (Mario Caiano, 1965) as a case study, it will then discuss how we can define
the picturesque in cinema and how such a style creates a perverse romance central to gothic horror. Finally,
it will consider the thematic importance of portraits in gothic horror and the hold they indicate of the past
in the present, of the encroaching overgrowth of nature, and of the possessing qualities of a beauty (both in
art and in human beings) whose emphasized artificiality contributes to the creation of an instability
between subjectivity and the real. The paper will thus discuss gothic cinema’s embrace of the picturesque
for its potential to create a supernatural sense of death-in-life. It will conclude by illuminating the role of
the picturesque in establishing a perverse pleasure in the archaic, the feminine, and the non-economically
productive, and thus in the genre’s tension between modernity and pastness and between the inanimate and
the animate.
ALLAN CAMERON  University of Auckland
Exchanging faces: reversible space in the ‘facial transmutation’ film
Faces are crucial to the production of cinematic space: from the close-up to the eyeline match to the reverse
shot, narrative cinema articulates spatial relations in relation to facially-oriented operations of perception
and expression. What, then, are the spatial implications of transforming or transplanting onscreen faces?
This paper explores the spatial dynamics of three films in which characters undergo radical facial
transmutations – The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966), Face/Off (John Woo, 1997) and Time
(Kim Ki-duk, 2007) – arguing that they provide a rich exploration of social and physical spaces (which
extends beyond their overt engagement with questions of identity and psychology). By deploying a variety
of aesthetic techniques, including distorted perspectives, fragmented or unbalanced compositions and
graphical repetition, these films produce a sense of space itself as malleable and reversible. In turn, this
spatial reversibility projects onto the face a new set of coordinates, presenting faces as abstract and
modular, suspended between stillness and movement, and subject to a logic of circulation and exchange.
Destabilizing the relationship between the faces of the characters and their immediate environments
(whether urban or pastoral, public or private), these films invite reflection on the facial underpinnings of
cinematic space.
BETH CARROLL  University of Southampton
Audiovisual haptic experience in Billy The Kid and the Green Baize Vampire
Song sequences in film musicals are often sites of extreme spectacle and multisensory excess: moments of
reaching out and touching the audience. Here, music and image are a single entity (one cannot exist without
the other) challenging the ocularcentrism found in traditional theory. I will analyze how key numbers from
the film Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985) demonstrate how the interaction between audiovisual elements induces an essentially haptic experience (a tactile relationship with the film). Film theory is
increasingly turning towards multisensory analysis; however image’s dominance is at the expense of
audiovisual understanding. Theorists such as Elsaesser, Marks and Sobchack have championed sensory
analysis yet they stop short at examining music. I will illustrate how Billy the Kid, a musical about a
snooker-playing vampire which toys with genre conventions, can be analyzed both visually and musically
to give a haptic reading. The film often employs distancing devices; however, I will demonstrate how these
do not prevent embodied tactile spectatorship through the negotiated audiovisual space. Forms of notation
will be used and I argue that the increasing trend in theory towards multisensory analyses can be applied to
music and image simultaneously.
JOHN CAUGHIE  University of Glasgow
Early Scottish cinema: the local, the rural and the public sphere
‘If modernism is often associated with urban centres – Paris, London, Dublin, New York – then Scottish
modernism is strikingly eccentric. The Orkney and Shetland Islands and small coastal towns like
Montrose were more important to its nurturing than Glasgow and Edinburgh.’
Times Literary Supplement, 6 November 2009
As part of a study of the development of cinema in small towns and rural areas in Scotland, this paper is a
case study of the development of cinema between 1897 and 1927 in the small coal and coastal town,
Bo’ness (1911 census population: 14,034), focusing particularly on the earliest purpose-built cinema in
Scotland, the Hippodrome (1911). The paper is based on a reading of advertisements, comments and
reports in the local press, and will show the ways in which early cinema engaged with other institutions,
such as the Presbyterian church, the town council and the local press, as a modernizing and cosmopolitan
force within the public sphere. In particular, it will be concerned with the ways in which early cinema –
both the films and the concert programme which often accompanied it – made the world visible outside the
major cities in a complex relationship of the local and the cosmopolitan.
MAUD CEUTERICK  University of Otago, New Zealand
Wandering women in the cosmofeminine space of contemporary art
According to Pollock et al. (2002), cosmopolitanism should be considered plural and open to mutation.
Moreover, coining the term ‘cosmofeminism’, these authors argue that the explosion of spatial boundaries
is particularly relevant for feminism. But how might this manifest aesthetically? In this paper I explore this
question using the work of audiovisual artists such as Shirin Neshat, Chantal Akerman and Janet Cardiff.
Cosmofeminism, Pollock et al. affirm, would create a critical space where the intimate sphere is part of the
cosmopolitan, and the domestic is no longer ‘confined socially or spatially to the private sphere’. I explore
figures of wandering women in urban cosmopolitan spaces, as represented in contemporary art. These
deterritorialized subjects evolve in a Deleuzian ‘smooth space’, whose limits are opened and undefined. I
argue that these works manifest a need to deconstruct binaries and to revise the idea of ‘private’ and
‘public’ spheres. These artistic expressions, in accord with the concept of cosmofeminism, portray nomadic
women as independent subjects-in-process and seem to demonstrate a common aesthetic, an ‘aesthetic of
becoming’.
ANCHALEE CHAIWORAPORN  Thailand Research Fund (Arts Criticism Project), Princess
Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre
The global rise of Tony Jaa’s cosmopolitan discontents
This paper explores the global rise of Thai action star Tony Jaa and his early works Ong Bak and Tom Yam
Goong – initially labeled domestically as examples of a dying B-grade action genre targeted at rural
audiences. I aim to analyze the transformation of these films from peripheral filmmaking to national
cinema and then global film culture – an apparently opposite trajectory to that of recent Thai arthouse films
or Hong Kong action movies. Through a distribution deal with Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, Muay Thai
cinema rapidly achieved western recognition without going through the longer processes of film festival
visits (as with Apichatpong Weerasethakul and other Thai independents) or the construction of Chinese
diasporic audiences (as with Hong Kong filmmakers). This trajectory may have allowed the films to
succeed despite their deviation from certain norms of Hong Kong and Hollywood action films –
choreography is embedded in the concept of the ‘authentic’ and ‘realistic’ acrobat – and despite their
cosmopolitan discontents in which cities like Bangkok and Sydney always signify a threat.
RANITA CHATTERJEE  University of Westminster
Cinema and the colonial city: early screen cultures in cosmopolitan Calcutta
The nineteenth-century city of Calcutta was a cosmopolitan centre of culture and commerce, boasting a
vibrant community of peoples from all over South Asia and indeed the world. It was in this context that the
cinema arrived and grew into the dominant cultural form in twentieth-century Calcutta. This history has not
quite been tracked by film historians focused on the national. At the same time, recent explorations of the
transnational have taken into account the global exchanges of Indian cinema, though this history of Indian
cinema focuses on Bombay, and Calcutta is not part of this narrative. Yet cosmopolitanism was at the heart
of Calcutta’s social and cultural identity and informed the rise of a very significant cinema industry.
Calcutta saw the parallel emergence of film exhibition in both the European town and the native town from
1897 onwards. This history of film circulation is tied in closely to patterns of habitation and urban
regeneration within the city and fits into older histories of entertainment within cosmopolitan Calcutta.
This paper explores early film cultures in colonial Calcutta to ask how frameworks of transnationalism and
cosmopolitanism inform our understanding of emergent screen cultures in Indian cities.
CHU-CHUEH CHENG  National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan
Reconfiguration, estrangement, and transgression in The White Countess
The White Countess (2005), scripted by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a cinematic adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s
The Diary of a Mad Old Man. The film treats Ishiguro’s and Tanizaki’s mutual concern, displacement, as a
multifaceted condition entangled with time, space, identity and reality. Displacement in the film first
appears as textual reconfiguration. Tanizaki’s novel revolving around changes in postwar Tokyo is
transformed into an English-language romance in prewar Shanghai. Estrangement from self is another form
of displacement. Shanghai, in which English-speaking internationals prevail, appears as a foreign city in its
own homeland. In this exoticized setting, Chinese natives become the Oriental Other to internationals;
voiceless and insignificant, they are props to authenticate the Chinese element of the English-language
film. Displacement in its most intricate form is narrative transgression, mutual intrusion of the inner and
outer narratives. Through the double foci of an American diplomat and a Japanese militarist, the film
illustrates a cinematic version of frame narrative, enclosing two Caucasians’ romance with Japan’s
aggression in China. Moments of metalespsis occur when the militarist unexpectedly appears in the
diplomat’s world. This character’s presence interrupts the narrative flow, alerts the audience to China’s
calamity and, most important of all, unsettles the narrative centre occupied by the romance.
SAYANDEB CHOWDHURY  Ambedkar University Delhi
The making of Calcutta as a cinematic city
This paper will look into the difficult negotiation of the idea of Calcutta as cosmopolis in Bengali cinema
between the early 1950s and mid 1960s. With a close reading of selected Bengali films from that era that
belong both to the selfconsciously arthouse cinema of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak to the populist
cinema of Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar, I will try to locate a discerning schizophrenia about the city
as location. In those fledgling years of postcoloniality and post-Partition trauma, Bengali cinema shared a
deeply felt but divided longing for the city. The city came to inhabit a meaning beyond its urbanity, both as
an alienator and as a preserver of middle classes, churned, as they were by territorial displacement,
economic opportunities and cultural aspiration. Ghatak’s Nagorik/The Citizen (1952) and Ray’s
Mahanagar/The Big City (1963) occupy the two ends of the period that I intend to look at with Kumar’s
Sare Chuattor/74&½ (1952), Surjo Toron/The Sun Tower (1957) Sohorer Itikatha’s Tales of the City
(1960) Deya Neya/Quid pro Quo, (1963) and Jotugriha/The Flammable House (1964) adding to a body of
cinema in which the city’s multiple selves intervene into a critique of its own cinematic appropriation and
in turn birth a cultural memory of the city that is entwined to its early representations.
MATTHIAS CHRISTEN AND KATHRIN ROTHEMUND  University of Bayreuth
Cosmopolitan cinema as utopian stance: probing societal forms in narrative terms
While the debates about postcolonial cinema, accented cinema, or the cinema of migration are preoccupied
with the issues of otherness and cultural difference, cosmopolitan cinema as a critical category might be
understood to open a broader perspective, in that it transgresses the diverging notions of opposing identities
and nationalities by substituting them with a utopian notion of cosmopolitanism in a Kantian vein. Neither
simply stating nor negating cultural difference, cosmopolitan cinema establishes – if not as a whole, then in
one of its most prominent strands – a third space where diverging notions of identity and belonging were
intertwined. Though not head on political in nature, cosmopolitan films of this particular variety are
probing transcultural societal forms and are thus commenting on the issues of transnationalism, migration
and globalization. They do so primarily in aesthetic instead of sociological terms. Network narratives and
the use of film music provide two key cinematic features in building this kind of transient utopian
communalities. While cinematic transnationalism is ever gaining importance in terms of production and
distribution, the paper will focus on the aesthetic dimension of cosmopolitan cinema and its utopian stance
– with regard to the films of Akin, Arslan and Charef.
ANNABEL COOPER  University of Otago
Cosmopolitan and colonial encounters: filmmaking in Māori communities, 1927
Pioneering New Zealand filmmaker Rudall Hayward and his crew arrived in the Bay of Plenty in 1927 to
make a historical drama about Te Kooti’s War (1869-72), one of the best-known conflicts of the country’s
colonial wars. Following his preferred practice, Hayward shot on historical locations and cast local people,
most of whom had connections to the historical events; at least two had fought in them. This paper
discusses the ongoing encounters between filmmaker, film – The Te Kooti Trail (1927), which was to
become a New Zealand cinema classic – and these local performers and their descendants. Hayward’s
agenda, to localize the Western and showcase national history, both drew from and was curtailed by local
knowledge and participation. Indeed one local group had more cosmopolitan influence than Hayward
anticipated, and precipitated the country’s first act of film censorship. Ongoing local engagement with the
film, particularly since the 1960s, continues to provoke questions about the encounter between national
cinema and local reception.
MIRIAM DE ROSA  Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan
Being there: the subject before cosmopolitanism
In the age of the globalized and the multicultural, film theories open up the debate to national cinemas,
accented cinema, or vice versa try to find ways to represent portal places, non-lieux, borders and spaces
featuring a powerful idea of transition and mobility. These attempts basically find their main expression as
thematizations that tackle the topic proposing typical iconographies of the national and the transnational.
Nevertheless, at the same time cinema and visual media elaborate these concepts giving birth to a different
interpretational model. In strategical terms, films, video installations and video performances seem to
respond to cosmopolitanism with an approach that opposes a specific, embodied and embedded perspective
to a wide one. Counterpart of the latter would then be the aestheticization of a position exquisitely
belonging to the individual, where the diegetic dimension and the real one overlap and converge. This
paper will analyze a number of experimental on-site projects – Studio Azzurro’s sensitive environments
(2010-12), Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof Videowalk (2012), Mark Shepard’s Serendipitor (2012) – on a
pragmatic level. Featuring a particular emphasis on rootedness, they betray the progressively widespread
assumption of the site-specificity scheme as a model to promote an appropriation of visual spaces
characterizing contemporary visual arts.
MARIJKE DE VALCK  University of Amsterdam
Circulation and promotion of alternative filmmaking through film festivals
Although Hollywood is the standard for cinema on the global scene, there have always been spaces and
opportunities for alternative forms of filmmaking, where marginal voices could be heard and counter
discourses were created and sustained. This paper investigates the role of film festivals in the circulation
and promotion of what we can broadly label as ‘alternative cinemas’. Firstly, it will address the complex
relations between the norm (Hollywood) and its alternatives (the various cinemas promoted through
festivals), or in other words, between the mainstream and the avant garde, the centre and the peripheries.
Drawing on work by Vanessa Schwartz (2007) and Christian Jungen (2009), it is argued that film festivals
have never simply functioned antagonistically to Hollywood, but utilized their relations with Hollywood to
generate a global and cosmopolitan circuit in which alternative filmmaking could come to blossom.
Secondly, it turns to scrutinize the contemporary festival scene and the ways in which the notion of
alternative filmmaking and anti-Hollywood rhetoric have changed. More specifically, I will look at the
influence of the global art cinema economy that emerged, the blurring of distinctions between popular and
art cinema, and the impact of new political pressures.
JAMES DONALD  University of New South Wales
Paul Robeson’s thwarted cosmopolitanism
Paul Robeson moved from New York to London in 1927, and London remained his base until he returned
to the USA as war broke out in Europe in 1939. During those years, Robeson led the cosmopolitan life of a
respected performer and a popular film, stage and music star. At the same time, he sought to define a public
persona that reflected his growing commitment to the international anticolonial, antiracist and antifascist
movements, while also seeking a sense of belonging that was repeatedly expressed as a desire to find
somewhere he could feel ‘at home’. Those desires were manifest in his search for film roles that he felt
matched his values, and in his often bitter disappointment at the movies that resulted. The tension between
the competing pressures in his life often curdled into a self-consuming anger, which led on occasions to
physical and mental breakdowns. The argument of this paper is that Robeson’s romantic-republican
perception of politics prevented him from seeing cosmopolitanism as an alternative ethic, which might
have proved a less existentially destructive frame within which to align the professional, the political and
the personal.
ANDREW DORMAN  University of St Andrews
A decentred aesthetic: consolidating cosmopolitanism through cultural spectacle in
contemporary Japanese ‘festival films’
Internationally renowned film festivals provide ideal arenas for the expression of cinematic
cosmopolitanism as films from various territories often conform to an ‘international’ aesthetic style that
characterizes the top-tier film festivals of Western Europe and North America. As a result, disparate
national cinemas and film styles are constructed according to the expectations of the festival/award circuit.
However, an international or cosmopolitan aesthetic often sits uneasily with the blatant projection of
national–cultural spectacles in certain films. Through a close analysis of two Japanese films – Dōruzu/
Dolls (Takeshi Kitano, 2002) and Okirubito/Departures (Yôjirô Takita, 2008) – this paper examines the
paradoxical nature of film exports in the context of western festival consumption. In Dolls and Departures
culturally specific formal elements are channelled through a nonspecific aesthetic style, and thus the
amalgamation of ‘national’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ aesthetics decentres the films as cultural texts. This process
consolidates the cultural power of western festivals with certain films conforming to a hegemonic film
aesthetic while also being complicit with the exoticization of so-called ‘World cinemas’. The cosmopolitan
project of many festivals is therefore highly dependent on cultural specificity even as they promote an
inclusive ‘global’ cinematic identity.
PHILIP DRAKE  Middlesex University
‘Restless natives’: creative labour and policymaking in cinemas of small nations
Sustaining creative talent and the management of career and reputation in film and television industries are
complex issues, and especially for small nations. Caldwell (2008) has argued for a more sophisticated
understanding of film and television production that conceives it as a ‘production culture’, invoking
anthropological and social meanings. Mayer et al. (2009) extend Caldwell’s approach to argue that new
tools are required in order to map complex authorial structures, and account for creative decision-making in
film production. However whilst a number of researchers have identified a need for a more nuanced
understanding of the creative process through engagement with industry practitioners, relatively few
studies have so far attempted this in small nation/regional cinemas characterized by peripatetic employment
and low levels of production. My paper will report on early findings of a research project focusing on
interviews with above and below-the line labour and policymakers in Scottish cinema, considering what
motivates creative labour in film production, and whether this aligns with policy conceptualizations of
‘creativity’. In doing so, it draws upon Hochschild’s (1983) concept of ‘emotional labour’ to consider why
practitioners are willing to work such long hours for little pay in order to be involved in film production. It
then places this in the context of recent debates about the creative sector in Scotland, in particular around
questions of political independence and the crisis in late 2012 at the government agency, Creative Scotland.
ELIZABETH EZRA  University of Stirling
‘Make Mine a Cosmopolitan’: Global Consumer Culture in Sex and the City 2
In Sex and the City 2, Carrie and company travel to Abu Dhabi in search of new experiences, like capital in
search of new markets. The logic of supplementarity (more, and more …) drives consumer culture, and in
its temporal dimension, obsolescence, underpins the film’s principal themes of biological reproduction,
cosmopolitanism, and commodity culture: or sex, the city, and shoes. Paraphrasing Lévi-Strauss (not the
jeans maker), we might say that shoes, shorthand for fashion, are not so much good to wear as they are
good to think. Even geography becomes prone to the vagaries of fashion in this film: we learn that Dubai is
‘so last year’, whereas oil-rich Abu Dhabi is representative of ‘the New Middle East’. As the island of
Manhattan could be bought long ago at a bargain-basement price, so the delights of the Middle East can be
readily consumed by wealthy westerners. When the veiled women of Abu Dhabi tear off their burqas to
reveal the same designer labels worn by Carrie and her friends, it becomes clear that designer labels are the
lingua franca of globalization, transcending cultural differences and uniting consumers across the world in
a common cause: the purchase of more shoes.
LIN FENG  University of Hull
Behind the dazzling lights: the secret of cosmopolitan Shanghai in Hollywood action
blockbusters
Film location has long been an important element in a film’s transnational appeal, and many Hollywood
blockbuster films are keen to embrace a megacity’s urban spectacle in order to boost their production
value. Especially in action blockbusters, such as the 007, Bourne and Mission Impossible franchises, the
lead characters’ adventures are often set in different metropolises. Through these characters’ eyes, a city’s
landmarks are presented to audiences’ and while the well-known buildings, skylines and sculptures
unmistakably distinguish one city from another, they also provide audiences with a global yet local
experience. In recent years, an increasing number of Hollywood action blockbusters, such as Mission
Impossible III (2006), Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Skyfall (2012) and Looper (2012), have
chosen to film in China’s financial centre, Shanghai. In these films, Shanghai’s skyline, architecture and
urban space are not just used as a backdrop, but also closely articulated with Hollywood’s interpretation of
China’s global role in the twenty-first century. This paper examines the way that Hollywood action
blockbusters explore, (de)construct and reorganize Shanghai’s urban space. I argue that in many of recent
Hollywood action blockbusters, Shanghai’s spectacular urban view is used to exemplify China’s fastgrowing power. Yet at the same time, Shanghai’s image is often digitalized and robotized in these films.
Thus Hollywood continue to mystify China as an Oriental stranger: the action hero’s adventure in Shanghai
reveals Hollywood’s hesitation and uncertainty towards China’s international influence in the period when
global power is gradually drifting from the West to the East.
AUSTIN FISHER  University of Bedfordshire
The ‘Years of Lead’ and the politics of gore: cultural capital and the giallo
In Italy, the politically motivated violence of the ‘Years of Lead’ (1969-83) had a traumatic and contested
impact upon the national memory. Much scholarship has focused on the filmic representation of these
events, yet their processes of negotiation within Italy’s popular cinema have only recently begun to be
charted. The giallo horror films in particular remain largely ghettoized within the bounds of their genre.
This paper will instead locate these films as documents of the country’s shift towards cosmopolitanism in
an era of rapid cultural change: documents which mediate the politics of these years by depicting shocking
levels of violence in modern Italian locales. The paper will thereby interrogate critical orthodoxies
surrounding political Italian cinema, arguing that they perpetuate long-standing currents in the discipline
that privilege notions of political ‘commitment’ while denying cultural capital to formats more easily
dismissed as ‘trash’. It will therefore assess wherein lies the ‘political’ significance of the giallo in the
specificities of its cultural landscape: by examining its self-reflexive engagement with transatlantic formats
as a filter for the traumas of the ‘Years of Lead’; and thereby considering the extent to which this genre
registers the undercurrents of 1970s Italy’s uncertain negotiation between cosmopolitanism and
parochialism.
MARGARET FLINN  Ohio State University
The anti-cosmopolitanism of Olivier Assayas
Since Irma Vep (1996), Olivier Assayas has been strongly associated with French, cinematic meditations
on globalization. Thanks to his prolific oeuvre as a film critic for the Cahiers du cinéma (and marriage to
muse Maggie Cheung), Assayas has been further associated with transnationalism, as champion of Asian
cinemas in Europe. Moreover, he has produced a significant body of films (demonlover [2002]; Clean
[2004]; Boarding Gate [2007]; Carlos [2010]) that all feature displaced persons and fragmentary
existences in a global economy. Multilingual and featuring actors of many nationalities, these international
co-productions in fact demonstrate what we might characterize as anti-cosmopolitanism. In this paper, I
show how Assayas’s subjects seem unable to engage in the generous connection with the other that
philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and K. Anthony Appiah have posited as
fundamental to cosmopolitanism. While the films of this corpus have narratives critical of the economic
logic of globalization, their characters’ failures at intersubjective connection (and their subsequent crises of
subjectivity) are shaped by cinematographic representation. Film form (music in Irma Vep and camera
movement in Boarding Gate, to give only two examples) mediates the very possibility of cosmopolitanism
as an ethical position for Assayas’s subjects. The work of Assayas thus furnishes a case where films are
transnational in their production, globalized in their themes, yet anti-cosmopolitan in their form and
philosophy.
CATHERINE FOWLER  University of Otago
Roots forward, routes back: Isaac Julien’s radicant moving image art
Attempting to explore how globalization has been manifest in particular aesthetic practices, Nicholas
Bourriaud argues that since the figures of ‘the immigrant, the exile, the tourist and the urban wanderer’
dominate contemporary culture, the individual might henceforth be thought of as a ‘radicant’, like the
plants that develop their roots as they advance, in contrast to the modern and postmodern ‘radical’, whose
development is determined by their being anchored in the ground. Contemporary art provides new models
for this individual who is constantly putting down new roots, taking new paths between traditions and
performing acts of translation. In particular, Bourriaud’s model aptly describes the work of Isaac Julien. In
the last fifteen years Julien has created multiscreen installations inspired by stories (real and imaginary) of
adventure (Western Union – small boats [2007]), expeditions (True North [2004]), and (im)migration and
exile (Paradise Ormeros [2002]; Ten Thousand Waves [2010]). Thematically this work explores the impact
of location – both cultural and physical – through a juxtaposition of opposing global regions. While
aesthetically Julien combines a dizzying array of pre-existing and invented practices in-frame – poetic
documentary, choreographed movement, musical flourishes – with multiscreen montage once the work is
installed in art spaces of all shapes and sizes.
MATTIAS FREY  University of Kent
Disturbing directors, disturbed programmers: the rhetoric and reception of extreme
cinema
‘Extreme cinema’ refers to quality films that partake of the institutional discourses of art cinema, but—
because of violent, sexual or other graphic content—engineer critical and popular controversy. Their
reception as ‘art’ rather than trash or exploitation expressly depends on their distribution to arthouse
cinemas and, above all, their programming at film festivals. Examining patterns of programming, the
rhetoric of filmmakers’ media appearances and interviews of key festival personnel (such as Christoph
Terhechte, programmer of the Berlinale’s Forum, Simon Field of Rotterdam), this paper – a part of an
AHRC-funded project on extreme cinema – interrogates the bifurcated flows of extreme cinema exhibition
vis-à-vis both ‘specialty’ festivals and the ‘majors’ (such as Berlin, Cannes and Toronto, and especially
series such as the Forum): filmmakers depend on the festivals’ cultural cachet and opportunities for media
exposure; the festivals depend on the films’ ‘exotic’ potential, artistic yet taboo status and on the
filmmakers’ media provocations.
YAEL FRIEDMAN  University of Portsmouth
The traps of transnational production contexts: the Palestinian case
Palestinian cinema exists primarily in urban cosmopolitan centres around the world. While at its core it is a
cinema defined by the national, in the absence of a viable film industry in Palestine, its production and
exhibition have been transnational since its inception. Palestinian films emerge from different sites of
production and are often funded by European film funds, NGOs and broadcasters. This paper will thrash
out some of the dynamics of production and exhibition of Palestinian films through the example of the
recent Oscar-nominee documentary 5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, 2011). The film
emerged out of Greenhouse – a development programme for documentary filmmakers from the Middle
East and North Africa. The programme is a EU–Mediterranean collaboration. It was initiated in 2005 by
The New Fund for Cinema and Television (Israel), the Ankara Cinema Association (Turkey), VOF Appel
& Honigmann (The Netherlands), and Zebra Productions (Spain) and has been funded by three separate
grants from the EU. The context of production of 5 Broken Cameras invites both political and theoretical
questions: what happens to the ‘national story’ when its sources of funding, its production setting and its
primary exhibition circuit are outside of the nation state and related to notions of aid? How and by whom
are the boundaries of this cinema drawn? And how are we to understand its aesthetics and modes of
representation?
RANIA GAAFAR  University of Art and Design, Karlsruhe/Goldsmiths College, London
Material Spectres of alterity: on cosmopolitical knowledge and phenomenotechnologies of
exilic film art
This paper will explore film as a methodology of a cosmopolitical and technological approach to the
phenomenology of the Other. It focuses on perceptual modalities of moving images in the gallery space
against the background of aesthetic tendencies in exilic/diasporic film art – in British film installation artist
and filmmaker Isaac Julien’s work in particular. The transformation and subsequent performativity of the
cinematic dispositive in moving image installations inside the gallery as well as the theoretical concepts of
the ‘mobile spectator’ have conceptualized aesthetic forms of cultural alterity as the technological
embodiment of experience in film. With the latter in mind, this paper aims to formulate a paradigmatic
shift in postcolonial research and media studies by emphasizing and functionalizing the experience of
otherness through the mediality of film, and its mode of being, as a way to perpetually approach a
cosmopolitical aesthetic dimension – even theory – of film. The dynamic experiments in the sciences that
follow a ‘phenomenotechnical’ method, in which knowledge is created through experience, will be
illuminated against the background of artistic knowledge. The ‘cinematization of video art’, it seems,
increasingly asks for film-philosophical approaches that examine the agency of film (images) and the
materiality of experience, and above all how the moving image exceeds the confinements of its projection
and discloses its desire to actually become.
MATTHEW ASPREY GEAR  Macquarie University
‘From Helsinki to Léopoldville’: national identity and erased distances in Orson Welles’s
Mr Arkadin
Mr Arkadin is one of the strangest films Orson Welles ever made. The bizarre story concept – ‘pulp
[elevated] to myth’ (J. Hoberman) – is doubly confusing because Mr Arkadin was ultimately unfinished by
Welles and exists in a variety of film and textual versions. An early experiment in ‘Eurosoup’ coproduction, Mr Arkadin was also a gesture towards postnational independent filmmaking. Often compared
to Citizen Kane, Mr Arkadin is actually derived from a radio spinoff of Carol Reed’s The Third Man
(1949), in which Welles starred as Harry Lime. But whereas The Third Man is set in postwar Vienna in a
mode of noirish realism, Mr Arkadin skips across Europe and the world in a selfconsciously artificial and
parodic mixture of styles that has been cited as a forerunner of the French New Wave. The film is
simultaneously fable, purported docudrama, grotesque sideshow and pulpy hardboiled narrative. From
Munich to Amsterdam, Mexico City to Tangiers, Mr Arkadin is a film of the aeroplane era (it begins with
an image of an empty plane in flight), proto-James Bond in its vision of erased distances. This paper wades
through the film’s convoluted production history to examine Orson Welles’s unique vision of national
identity in the post-World War II urban landscape.
HOLLY GIESMAN  University of Roehampton
Documentary film and ‘good-enough’ cosmopolitanism
This paper considers Kevin Robins’s notion of ‘good-enough’ cosmopolitanism as it might be applied to
crosscultural documentary film. I also draw from work I have done as part of a practice-based documentary
film research project in which I employed reflexive filmmaking practice with three ‘authentic’ national
restaurants in London to explore documentary filmmaking in the contemporary context of cultural
globalization. Through world music – or ‘migrating music’ as he prefers to call it – Kevin Robins hopes to
provide some new insight into contemporary cosmopolitanism. In order to do this, he adopts a more
practical or realistic cosmopolitan perspective. Appropriating a term from psychoanalytic theory –
specifically Winnicott’s ‘good-enough’ mother – Robins proposes the notion of ‘good-enough’
cosmopolitanism. In doing so, he counters criticism of cosmopolitanism as utopian and encourages
engagement with the transformational potential of world music. My research explores crosscultural
documentary film from a similar perspective. I examine Robins’s notion of ‘good-enough’
cosmopolitanism in relation to my film Eating Cultures as well as to documentary film more generally.
What kind of insight does such an approach provide, and is Robins’s concept robust enough to challenge
criticism of cosmopolitan enthusiasm?
GRAHAM NEIL GILLESPIE  King’s College London
From ambivalence to amity: internalized reflexive cosmopolitization in Taiwanese cinema
Wei Te-sheng’s films Cape No. 7 (2008) and Warriors of the Rainbow (2011) represent shifts in the
articulation of Taiwanese attitudes towards Japan in cinema. While earlier Taiwanese films like The
Puppetmaster expressed a marked ambivalence towards the former colonizer, Cape’s multi-ethnic politics
are reconciliatory, speaking to pan-Asian amity and the ongoing globalization of the region. Cape No. 7
garnered positive box office and press in Taiwan on account of its authentic portrayal of small town life. In
this paper, I argue that this shift is achieved by collapsing the metropolitan/rural and centre/periphery
dynamics that characterized Taiwan’s experience of ‘compressed modernity’ and which animated many
works of the Taiwan New Cinema, particularly those of Hou Hsiao-hsien. It instead imagines the small
town as a cosmopolitan space integrated within a neoliberal economic order, combining local tai-ke
humour with ‘global city’ (Sassen 1991) characteristics. Warriors of the Rainbow, on the other hand,
cosmopolitanizes history by collapsing nativist and colonial ideologies; I argue this with a focus on
peripheral characters. Utilizing theory from the ‘cosmopolitan turn’ within academic sociology (Beck
1998, Beck & Grande 2007), and particularly Chang Kyung-sup’s (2010) work on how compressed
modernity in East Asia can function as ‘internalized reflexive cosmopolitization’, I show how Wei’s films
about Taiwan–Japan relations at two different historical junctures reincorporate Japan into the
cosmopolitan fold, rather than eschewing it as colonial Other.
KEARA GOIN  University of Texas at Austin
‘Why is Ugly Betty Mexican American?’ The role of narrative location in constructions and
perceptions of Latinidad
While representations of Latina/os are increasingly seen within the normalized framework of the ‘Latin
Look’, which assumes both physical and behavioural qualities usually associated with a form of Mexicanoriented Hispanic off-whiteness, the increased representational marginalization of other Latino identities
has become a very geographical one (Rodriguez 1997; Davila 2001; Pena-Ovalle 2011). Pushed to the
bastions of New York City and Miami, representations of what I call ‘marginal latinidad’ locate a
distinctively Afro-latinidad that is separate and peripheral to generic Latino/Hispanic representation. And
while shows like Ugly Betty provide evidence of the encroaching homogenization of all forms of
representational latinidad, there is still an industrial tendency to situate Afro-Latina/os in either of these
two Caribbean coded cities. By limiting Caribbean-Latino representations to New York City or Miami,
characters in the context of the cities then are endowed with a certain racialization linked to blackness
(Beltran 2008; Rivera 2003; Flores 2009). While Afro-Caribbean (Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican)
characters are not necessarily read as African American within these regions, neither are they necessarily
read as generically Hispanic. In the context of New York City and Miami, I argue that a space is opened up
to allow for an alternative form of representational latinidad.
TREVOR GRIFFITHS  University of Edinburgh
A clearer and larger outlook on life: Scottish audiences and early moving picture shows,
1896-1926
This paper examines the close and shifting relationship between the local and the cosmopolitan in the
presentation and reception of film across urban Scotland in the silent era. As a cultural force emerging at a
point when Scotland’s links with wider global forces, both economic and political, were at their height,
cinema’s capacity to encourage an engagement with broader national, imperial and international concerns
was clear. Here, the manner in which the wider world was introduced and explained to audiences, through
the selection of relevant material and the adoption of appropriate modes of presentation, is traced through
an analysis of surviving business records and discussion in the mainstream and trade press. Forces
operating to promote and to inhibit cinema’s cosmopolitan potential are examined, from the changing
character of the audience (in terms of its class, age and gender balance) to the development of particular
financial and industrial structures which would shape the exhibition of the moving image across the silent
era. Attention finally shifts to the implications this balance between cosmopolitan and parochial influences
carried for Scotland’s recurrent, if fitful, attempts at film production.
MARCO GROSOLI  University of Kent
Against cosmopolitanism: the universalistic approach of the ‘Politique des auteurs’
Film festivals are known to have consolidated a certain ‘cosmopolitan spirit’ in the 1950s cinema scene,
often bridging East and West in the midst of Cold War. But while the festival network was actively and
efficiently building what we can nowadays call ‘world auteur cinema’, the ‘Politique des auteurs’, that is,
the Cahiers du cinéma critical faction whose ideas have been of paramount importance in the development
of author theory, firmly rejected it: Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut, for instance, insisted in several
festival reports on how little the interest of ‘the cinema from small nations’ was. This paradox can be best
explained by pointing out how central the place of universalism (best embodied by classical Hollywood,
and by what Jacques Rivette called ‘the universal language of mise en scène’) was in the ‘Politique’’s
notion of authorship. By drawing upon several lesser-known articles from either the Cahiers and Arts
journals by those critics, my paper will try to clarify the opposition between ‘universalism’ and
‘cosmopolitanism’ according to the ‘Politique’, the reason why they privileged the former, and the complex
relationships between this attitude and those of the subsequent forms of auteurist cinephilia.
MALINI GUHA  Carleton University
The politics of circulation: new orientalism and the case of Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I
This paper will draw upon the recent controversy surrounding the attempted ‘blacklisting’ of Caveh
Zahedi’s The Sheik and I (2012) by documentary programmer Thom Powers in order to produce a
meditation upon the limitations of the cosmopolitan impetus of current World cinema discourse. As noted
by scholars such as Caren Kaplan, the ability to move and circulate freely is a distinctly modern value that
is central to the cosmopolitan project. This is precisely where one can locate the cosmopolitan flavour of
much of the scholarly literature on the subject of World cinema, in its emphasis on mobility and circulation
of films around the world as facilitated by film festivals in addition to transnational modes of funding. The
case of Zahedi’s film, particularly in its narration through journalistic means, published email exchanges
and YouTube responses, offer up various ways of rethinking the notion of circulation in dialectical terms.
While the multiplicity of platforms that are made to tell Zahedi’s story are a mark of the utopian aspect of
specifically digital forms of circulation, the story itself evokes larger questions of boundaries and
blockades that pivot around difficult questions concerning who is allowed the privilege of cosmopolitanism
and at what cost. This paper will make the claim that the difficulties of circulation that this case study
presents can be utilized more broadly to bring together political concerns with the study of World cinema
as related to the phenomenon of New Orientalism.
BOAZ HAGIN  Tel Aviv University
‘The workshop of Israel’s spirit’: the ‘chosen’ people and spiritualist cosmopolitanism in
the writings of Margot Klausner
In her writings, prolific German-born author, film and theatre producer, and founder of Israel’s major film
studio, Margot Klausner (1905-75), forges a cosmopolitan view on Jewish identity and Israeli cinema.
Heavily influenced since her Berlin childhood by parapsychology and Eastern philosophy in addition to
German Märchen and Sagen, she often describes her own Zionist and Jewish identity comparatively and
from without, seeing cinema as a means to ‘spread the light of our just cause all over the world’, while
taking into account the world’s view on Israel and describing Ancient Egyptian and Greek viewpoints on
Hebraism in her historical fiction. She views media as a means for globally propagating the unique ‘light’
specific groups have to give the world – Jews, the Chinese, ‘Negroes’ – and charts a teleology that begins
with talking films and reaches its zenith with satellite broadcasting. Moving images, like reincarnation,
serve in her writings to cut across identities such as gender, ethnicity and sexuality, by offering a means to
access otherness without denying difference. Her work not only suggests a framework for understanding
certain Israeli films (500,000 Black [1977]; To Cheat a Cheater [1977]), but also an unexplored branch of
postwar continental thinking about cinema and media.
KERRY HEGARTY  Miami University
Fragmented aesthetics and ideology in twenty-first-century Mexican cinema
This paper examines the dialogue between contemporary national and transnational Mexican filmmakers –
Fernando Eimbcke, Carlos Reygadas, Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Patricia Riggen, Israel
Cárdenas, Juan Carlos Rulfo, Gael García Bernal – and looks at how their aesthetics are both informed by
the ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ of the past (which is unique to the Mexican film industry) and/or how they
consciously or unconsciously reject this aesthetic and ideological project. In this regard, my paper aims to
articulate a new ‘style’ or aesthetics that incorporates other globalized, mediated languages into
filmmaking – specifically that of advertising, which many contemporary directors in Mexico (and Latin
America in general) have had extensive experience in, and which is looked to by some as a language more
‘modern’ and ‘global’ than that of a nationalist cinema. Nonetheless, I argue that the fragmented aesthetics
that so often characterize contemporary Mexican film production – tripartite narrative structure, elliptical
editing, visual and audio dissonance, and so on – represent a clear challenge to the structuralist dialectics
that Mexican cinema was founded on (rich/poor, old/young, Indian/European, rural/urban). Thus I explore
the ideological potential of these fragmented aesthetics to convey more deeply a postnationalist,
postauthoritarian vision of the Mexican cultural imaginary.
STEPHANIE HEMELRYK DONALD  University of New South Wales
A child in the new Chinese city: mobility, violence and stasis
In Peng Tao’s Little Moth (2008) a young girl is brought from the mountains to the city, carried on the back
of a man who has purchased her for 1000 yuan. The city is low-scaled, grey and predominantly built in
concrete. Thus the figure of this poor, sick child is deployed as a marker of utter despair in a blankly harsh
urban environment, typical of many new cities in China’s central provinces. This film does not venture far
from this nondescript area, but it is nonetheless a film about the cosmopolitanism of economic migration,
in which class disadvantage, poverty and ancient forms of provincial criminality combine to produce a
narrative and narrational pace premised on foreboding. The film focuses on those who cannot move but
must move in order to survive. A relatively small city is presented as complex and aggressive, as no single
place is connected to any other. Nothing fits together. There is no continuity. Every street corner, every
eating place, every tiny rented room is separated from the social stability that place-making and grounded
cosmopolitanism might require. This is a film about profound deracination and the double weight of
historical marginalization and contemporary urbanization upon the poor.
JOANNE HERSHFIELD  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Modernist filmmaking in a postmodernist world: the films of Carlos Reygadas
Recent scholarship on art cinema reconsiders the aesthetic, economic and geocultural assumptions that film
theorists have traditionally made about the institutional and formal parameters of this film category. In their
recent anthology, Global Art Cinema, for example, Galt and Schoonover propose that we think of art
cinema as ‘both an aesthetic category … and a geopolitical category [that] provides an important lens
through which to interrogate the consequences of globalization’. This reconsideration emerges in response
to the contemporary resurgence of art cinema practices among filmmakers working in different national
contexts such as Taiwan, Iran, Thailand, China, Japan, Hong Kong and Mexico. My analysis of three films
of Mexican director Carlos Reygadas – Japón, Silent Light, and Battala en el cielo – explores how we
might consider the relationship of modernist films to the concepts of the nation and of national cinema in
the context of postmodernism and postnationalism.
ROSA HOLMAN  University of New South Wales
Translating Iranian diasporic cinema: identity and reterritorialization in Tina Gharavi’s I am
Nasrine
The recent proliferation of Iranian women’s diasporic cinema testifies to the importance of recognizing and
mapping current trends within the growing field of transnational cinema. In particular, the contribution of
exilic and émigré filmmakers reveals the creation of new intercultural cinematic narratives and production
methodologies. This paper adopts Tina Gharavi’s film, I am Nasrine (2012), as a case study for
demonstrating both the possibilities and limits of Iranian diasporic filmmaking. It examines the ways in
which the film foregrounds the struggles of Iranian asylum-seekers in the UK and how these may
correspond with those of the British Romany. Gharavi’s film explores and complicates notions of mobility,
reterritorialization and resourcefulness and reveals how the exiled subject may form new and productive
cultural alliances in a globalized arena. This paper argues that I am Nasrine is important in not only
representing the challenges of marginal and displaced subjects, but also in referencing the interstitial
processes of diasporic filmmaking and the emergence of an Iranian transnational cinema. It examines what
technologies and production methodologies are utilized in the processes of storytelling and how they
enable the diasporic director to literally and metaphorically reframe the concepts of identity, homeland and
culture.
SEUNG-HOON JEONG  NYU Abu Dhabi
Mapping global cinema through reshaping cosmopolitanism
This paper attempts to theorize ‘global cinema’ anew as reflecting the contemporary cosmopolitan world,
its system of inclusion and symptoms of exclusion. While the global community encompasses ever more
differences in multiculturalist harmony, real antagonism emerges less between its relatively homogenized
members/citizens or interest/identity groups than between the whole system and its remnant as immanently
produced outside. Cosmopolitanism then works no longer simply for political liberalism or cultural
modernism in the name of tolerance and hospitality, but for bio-/subpolitical ethics or network ecology as it
is ‘enforced’ to the multitude of this Empire confronted with world risks and global catastrophes in
everyday connected and contaminated life. Drawing on diverse critics in this regard (Appiah, Beck,
Hardt/Negri, Agamben, Žižek, Rancière), the paper suggests a preliminary mapping of both mainstream
and alternative global cinemas that engage with such global phenomena as cognitive capitalism, (war on)
terror, control/militancy, migration/abjection, bare/precarious life, and apocalypse even in a local setting:
from Hollywood blockbusters such as the Bourne and Dark Knight series through non-Hollywood genrebased and middle-brow films to works by ‘glocal’ auteurs including Trier, Haneke, Akin, Iñárritu, Cuarón
and Apichatpong. The task is to take a further step from established studies on (trans)national and World
cinema towards an overarching conceptual platform on which to frame today’s multifaceted cinema in light
of interdisciplinary discourses. Yet also proposing to reshape these discourses through some symptomatic
films, this project will ultimately picture ‘atopian’ cosmopolitanism emerging among abject agents in
contingent commonality whose subjectivity floats over the edge of the global system.
MATTHEW JONES  see MELVYN STOKES
RACHEL KAPELKE-DALE  University College London
The iconic polyglot: Greta Garbo and MGM’s cosmopolitan recruitment strategy
Hollywood mythology touts the ‘accidental’ discovery of stars, at once highlighting their uniqueness and,
paradoxically, their normality. However, star recruitment was actually often undertaken with the utmost
deliberation as a key component of building audiences. This paper will examine why MGM recruited Greta
Garbo and subsequently constructed her as a cosmopolitan star. Consequently, it will also discuss the
development of cosmopolite’s image as well as what it meant to be ‘cosmopolitan’ in an increasingly
isolationist period of American history. In the decade after World War I, Hollywood studios had the
opportunity to expand into a significantly weakened European film market; one major strategy of
developing foreign audiences was the promotion of international stars such as Garbo. Garbo became one of
MGM’s most lucrative stars precisely because of this cosmopolitan construction, which played upon issues
of Europeanness, whiteness and wealth in order to further MGM’s financial interests. In this sense, Garbo
contributed to a two-pronged MGM initiative: on one hand, she was a tool for gaining audiences abroad
(and thus tapping into foreign revenue); on the other, she was an exotic star who would bring prestige to
the studio (and thus tap into domestic revenue – building the brand beyond her own image to make MGM
more profitable as a whole). By marketing Garbo’s star persona in such a way, MGM was in a sense selling
existing conceptions of the ‘cosmopolitan’ and, I will argue, developing this term’s material connotations.
ABIGAIL KEATING  University College Cork
What’s in an eponym? Embodied (non)identity in ‘Celtic Tiger’ Irish cinema
This paper will engage with the narrative focus on, and aesthetic implications of, the problematics of
identity construction/maintenance in a selected number of Irish films set within the country’s ‘Celtic Tiger’
period. Specifically, I will draw attention to the recurrent utilization of the forename as signifier of the
embodied loss of broader national–cultural identity, through an underlining of the importance of the
(distinctly named) body as site of consumption (in that, it consumes and is consumed) in the face of the
transnational flows and cosmopolitanization with which this era of economic prosperity (1995-2008) is
historically associated. Focusing predominantly on urban films set within the latter half of the period, my
analysis will be formed by four overlapping observations on this trend: eponymous characters as peripheral
narrative figures; eponymous characters and the relation between corporeality and (identity) movement; the
forename as evocation of crosscultural intertextuality and intermediality; and the forename (and its vocal,
diegetic articulation) as allusion to the concept of ‘non-identity’. Films to be discussed are Stembridge’s
About Adam (2000), Abrahamson’s Adam and Paul (2004), Daly’s Kisses (2008) and Abrahamson’s What
Richard Did (2012).
GILLIAN KELLY  University of Glasgow
Robert Taylor: ‘the invisible star’ of classical Hollywood cinema
Robert Taylor is a significant ‘forgotten’ star of Hollywood cinema. Beginning his career as a matinee idol
in 1934, the postwar period brought him grittier roles, before costume epics in the 1950s and a weekly
detective show throughout the 1960s. Taylor may be ‘forgotten’ today because his star persona was built
around four normative and ideologically conservative social categories: as white, heterosexual, American
and male it may be that he appears to scholars and retrospective audiences as too ‘normal’ and thus
‘invisible’ in the field of star studies. This is further underlined by the way in which Taylor seemed to
seamlessly fit the genres and trends of each decade he worked in. Yet Taylor presents a particularly
interesting case study of a star because of his ‘past remarkable’ status and in relation to his longevity,
considering his star persona was principally based around his looks. The fact that he was able to sustain a
career for over thirty years opens up questions and assumptions about (male) stars and aging. I will discuss
Taylor’s invisibility as he crossed four dominant social norms (whiteness, heterosexuality, Americanness
and maleness) sustaining a long and successful career despite the apparent limitations of his ‘star qualities’.
KAROLINA KENDALL-BUSH  University College London
Cosmopolitan London: projecting London’s prewar immigrant communities
The 1924 travelogue film Cosmopolitan London presents spectators with a succession of London’s
immigrant communities hailing from places as diverse as Cyprus, the Caribbean and China. Since the
1900s, when the East End’s Jewish residents became the subjects of the actuality film Petticoat Lane
(1903), filmmakers had trained their cameras on London’s immigrants, projecting an image of London as
cosmopolis to the world. This paper asks: what do these cosmopolitan projections tell us about London’s
relationship with its immigrant populations and, indeed, the rest of the world? Answering these questions, I
analyze travel films of London made between 1903 and 1939 that feature London’s overseas-born residents
alongside written accounts of the city’s immigrant neighbourhoods. During this period, London was the
capital of an empire as well as a country and many of the people included in these films were colonial
subjects. Projecting a ‘cosmopolitan’ city, these films also presented viewers with an imperial hub. My
paper therefore goes on to explore how the cosmopolitanism of screen London was bound up with the
imperial project. Contributing to scholarship on the twentieth-century cosmopolitan city, I investigate how
a cinematic vision of cosmopolitan London reflected wider notions of citizenship in an imperial capital.
PAUL KERR  Middlesex University
Film traffic, human traffic
This paper will discuss films about human trafficking, of which there have been dozens of international
examples since the new millennium, films which are in a sense both ‘about’ transnationalism,
globalization, cosmopolitanism (no space to critique the conceptual categories here) and yet at the same
time, while diagnosing these things, are also symptoms of globalization themselves. Not just in the sense
that as ‘realist’ fictions they depict the world of global flows their characters inhabit, but also because their
very viability – and indeed visibility – as films depends on international co-productions, international
movements of diasporic talent, international film festivals (and indeed, occasionally, conferences) and
international brands and tropes, like the subject matter, style, and sometimes star names and/or authorial
signatures that help guarantee their circulation..
AKSHAYA KUMAR  Screen PhD student, University of Glasgow
From convex to concave: Indian cinemas and the cosmopolitan lens
Cosmopolitanism calls for the privileging of an equivalential logic over a differential one. But in doing so,
it also plays into the hands of hegemony of the present over other temporalities. The resistance to this
tendency comes from within cinema, uncomfortable as it always is in the company of other orientations of
time, and challenges to the filmic cosmos: the world of cinema, cinema as the world. Taking up the case of
Indian cinemas then, I would like to attend to the shifting identitarian register of Hindi cinema from
convexity to concavity, from a national equivalence to an international one. I would argue that in making
this move, Indian cinema produced several differential logics, which were soon taken up by vernacular
imaginaries, which could jump the textual obstruction by taking charge of the digital message. Thus, as
convex mainstream moved towards concavity, several vernacular convexities were produced, each
demanding and bringing to fruition a version of ‘our cinema’. While we focus upon the equivalences
produced by capital within a cosmopolitan arc, vernacular cinemas challenge it by producing new places
commanding their own cosmos. The question they throw at us, then, would be: who owns the cosmos of
cosmopolitanism?
MING-YU LEE  University of Glasgow
The man migrates with a movie camera: from Vertov to Liu Na’Ou
Dziga Vertov’s famous Man with a Movie Camera (1929) has been a landmark in both documentary and
avant-garde domains; however, at about the same period in Taiwan, Liu Na’Ou made a series of short films
entitled Man With Camera (1933). The similarity in film title is hardly a coincidence – as a filmmaker,
writer and editor of literary magazine, Liu was probably the first and the most important figure in Taiwan
avant-garde film movement. This paper traces back the film theory of Liu Na’Ou and its connections to
Vertov’s Kino-Eye, and speculates as to how Vertov’s Man with A Movie Camera migrates from Europe to
Taiwan. The second part of the paper analyzes the films of Liu Na’Ou and compares them with Vertov’s
work, to see how the cinematic form, content and aesthetics change during the process of migration. In
conclusion, the paper reflects on the idea of migration between cinematic genres and between documentary
and diaristic film.
ALFIO LEOTTA  Victoria University of Wellington
Small nations and global dispersal of film production: a comparative analysis of the movie
industry in New Zealand and the UAE
The United Arab Emirates is a small country which boasts a large oil reserve, but has virtually no history of
film production. The growing desire to see local stories on the big screen, coupled with the need to
diversify an economy which heavily relies on oil extraction, has pushed the local government to invest
increasing resources into the film industry. Government-funded production company Image Nation, for
example, was recently endowed a US$ 1 billion capital to establish partnerships with international studios
such as Hyde Park Entertainment and Warner Bros. In 2011 Image Nation has co-produced successful
blockbusters such as The Help and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The profits from these global
successes have been used to subsidize local productions and training programmes for young Emirati
filmmakers. By implementing such a unique business model, Image Nation attempts to follow in the
footsteps of other small nations such as New Zealand, where the film sector now accounts for a significant
percentage of the country’s GDP. The popularity of filmmakers such as Peter Jackson has attracted
international film productions which in turn have contributed to the upskilling of local talent and the
development of film infrastructures. The two countries have developed different, but converging strategies
to benefit from the global dispersal of film production in both cultural and economic terms.
SKADI LOIST  University of Hamburg
Exchange networks: the international film festival circuit and global film circulation
Film festivals are the foremost showcases and marketplaces today, functioning as exchange networks for
global cinema. High-ranked festivals such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin serve as ‘nodal points’ within the
circuit and influence the further circulation of a film on the international festival circuit and the global
exhibition market (De Valck 2007). The impact of such nodal points within the circuit depends on the
hierarchical position of the individual festival. Beyond this level, Iordanova (2009) asserts that there is not
only one circuit in place but actually a number of parallel circuits. Top-tier festivals form one circuit from
which arthouse films trickle down to further layers of smaller festivals. Regional festivals serve as ‘source
festivals’ for new waves of national cinemas that feed into the global circuit (Iordanova 2010). Festivals
with specializations in documentary, short film or LGBT film form their own circuits with varying
connections to the global film festival network (Loist/Zielinski 2012). This paper takes a look at the
international film festival circuit and focuses on the relational structure in the network of festivals in order
to estimate the impact this structure has on global film circulation.
KATERINA LOUKOPOULOU  Panteion University, Athens
Basil Wright’s documentaries on Greece
Basil Wright’s career is conventionally identified with the 1930s productions of the British Documentary
Movement. New historiographical enquiries, however, have started to question not only this assumption
but also to point towards the need for a broader revision of both the periodization of the Documentary
Movement and its geographical scope. For example, Zoë Druick’s recent discussion of World without End
(Basil Wright and Paul Rotha, 1953) has revealed the little-known relationship between UNESCO and key
figures of the Documentary Movement after World War II, revising in effect its legacy. This paper looks at
another neglected moment of the Documentary Movement’s postwar internationalism: two documentary
films about Greece that Basil Wright shot on location and with new collaborators: Greece: the Immortal
Land (1958); and Greek Sculpture: 3000 BC to 300 BC (1959). The paper draws on Transnational History
and histoire croisée (entangled history) methodologies to analyze the historical conjuncture of the
cosmopolitanism advocated in these two films at a moment when Greek culture (ancient and modern) was
becoming a symbol of transnational humanism, as had been manifested with the UNESCO’s adoption of a
minimalist rendering of the Parthenon as its visual logo.
MOYA LUCKETT  New York University
Celebrity, stardom and ambivalence: Hollywood’s misgivings about screen fame
As numerous analyses have demonstrated, Hollywood films typically engage with the culture’s most
compelling fantasies. One significant exception was screen stardom, which was rarely addressed in films
during the silent and classical eras, and, where covered, was treated largely in cautionary terms. Given
stardom’s centrality to the studio system and the public fascination with celebrity, such treatment attests to
the industry’s own ambivalence about screen fame. This uncertainty/hostility was further manifested in
trade press and fan magazine anti-star commentary, a spate of lawsuits against actors claiming breach of
contract and the institution of the seven-year contract. During the mid-to-late 1910s, in particular, the
industry openly expressed concerns about stars’ economic and social power and their capacity to distract
attention away from narrative and other textual features. Such beliefs made films about stardom both
uncommon and significant, providing insight into how Hollywood negotiated stardom’s attractions and its
own reservations. Even star-centred newsreels were independently produced, as major studios eschewed
this subject. This paper looks at films about stardom, primarily from the mid-to-late 1910s, in the context
of these period discourses and practices, examining how Hollywood’s ambivalence around stardom helped
shape screen protocols and the presentation of stars on and off screen.
ALLISON MACLEOD  University of Glasgow
Compartmentalized cosmopolitans: constructions of urban space in queer Irish cinema
Beginning in the 1990s, there emerged a new urban sensibility in queer Irish cinema that celebrated the city
as a cosmopolitan, utopian and liberal space. While this reimagined urban space can be seen as an attempt
to escape traditional markers of Irish cinematic identity, particularly those related to placehood and the
rural imagery, this representational strategy has also been criticized for being ‘without a clear sense of local
identity’ (Ruth Barton 2004). Thus while the desire to not be culturally specific may be a strategy of
avoiding a representational history steeped in issues around the nation and national identity, it also signals
a potential inability to engage with contemporary political and social realities. This becomes particularly
problematic when looking at the representation of sexual identity in queer Irish cinema. Using Cowboys
and Angels (David Gleeson 2003) and Goldfish Memory (Liz Gill 2002) as case studies, I argue for these
films’ representations of cosmopolitan space as being compartmentalized. I use compartmentalization to
refer to a disconnection between identity and place, both visually (the division and separation of spaces
within the urban fabric) and in terms of embodiment (how bodies move in and out of spaces and define
themselves within those spaces). I argue that by implying fluidity through queer sexuality, but
compartmentalizing that fluidity with rigid and non-fluid spatial structures, sexual identities are detached
from the reality to which they are meant to relate to become largely symbolic. Therefore the films’
apparent liberalism actually obscures their lack of critical engagement with sexual politics in contemporary
Ireland.
TIJANA MAMULA  John Cabot University
From psychophysical correspondences to the media unconscious: Theory of Film today
In Theory of Film, Kracauer splits the essence of the filmic medium into three correlated functions: cinema,
he states, ‘effectively assists us in discovering the material world with its psychophysical
correspondences’. In other words, the cinema is, in the first place, particularly suited to revealing the
material world; secondly, this revelation is of assistance to the spectator, who needs the cinema’s
redemptive power in order to overcome the loss of a functional relation between abstract thought and lived
reality; finally, in bringing traces of materiality to the viewer’s consciousness, films trigger
‘psychophysical correspondences’ between the reality represented and the memory of those who absorb it.
This paper rereads Kracauer’s tripartite definition – and the conflict between conscious perception and
unconscious memory, between visibility and invisibility, that structures it – through the lens of the
linguistic dimension of his exile to the USA and the light shed on this in Arnheim’s review of Theory of
Film, acutely titled ‘Melancholy Unshaped.’ Such a reading brings to the surface a number of significant
echoes between the concept of the psychophysical correspondence and several key contemporary
rethinkings of filmic indexicality, in its relation to the work of consciousness and mnemic processing (for
example, Elsaesser’s recent theorization of the ‘media Unconscious’). In addition to nuancing our
understanding of the historiography of realist film theory, the parallels between these two approaches
evidence the extent to which Kracauer’s volume remains a unique and deeply relevant exploration of the
relationship between cinema, memory and language.
NIRMALA MANNE NAGARAJ  English and Foreign Language University, Hyderabad
Film labour in a cosmopolitan trap
In framing the film industry as an ethnic enterprise, the positioning of film labour as cosmopolitan becomes
inevitable. The establishment of a studio, the placement of film workers and the making of a film are
largely concentrated in cities. This positioning has blurred the social identity of the film worker in a
capitalist-driven film industry. The issues of caste, colour, class and gender are seldom discussed in the
workplace. The cosmopolitan mask has overshadowed the everyday struggle of film workers with a false
portrayal of a shared economic relationship and inclusive work culture. In India, on average more than a
thousand films are made each year, in twenty-six languages. The industry is labour-intensive and provides
direct and indirect employment to around five million people (about one million directly and the remaining
four million indirectly). This large casual film workforce has been positioned in cities, the centre of film
production. This paper is an attempt to study this cosmopolitan positioning of film labour within Indian
film industries.
GINA MARCHETTI  University of Hong Kong
The contradictions of cosmopolitanism: Hong Kong women filmmakers, the New Wave
and World cinema
Hong Kong trumpets its status as ‘world city’ to promote trade, tourism, and to distinguish itself from the
supposedly less cosmopolitan metropolises across the border; but, for the world, Hong Kong exists
primarily as an imagined montage of ethnically defined kung fu, triad violence, neon Chinese characters
and exotic Asian faces. In this melange, women figure as insubstantial markers of sexual desirability,
martial intensity or emotional vulnerability, clothed as often in dynastic Chinese robes as in contemporary
haute couture. Their racial and sexual ‘otherness’ prevents them from attaining the cosmopolitan modernity
generally associated with Hong Kong’s ‘world city’ status. These screen fantasies of Hong Kong females,
however, belie other, equally worldly, representatives of Hong Kong women. In fact Hong Kong boasts
some of the most visible, vivacious and cosmopolitan women filmmakers working today. They cover the
gamut from the commercial to the edges of the avant garde and the vanguard of political documentary. In
terms of global visibility, however, the women filmmakers associated with the Hong Kong New Wave
have garnered most international accolades and most scholarly attention. Ann Hui’s films, for example,
have been lauded in Venice and Berlin, and her Boat People is notorious for being pulled from competition
at Cannes in 1983. Patricia Erens, Tony Williams, Elaine Ho and Chua Siew Keng have written eloquently
on Hui’s semi-autobiographical Song of the Exile, and Audrey Yue has made the film the subject of a
book-length treatment. Mabel Cheung and Clara Law also stand out as internationally recognized veteran
directors. Educated outside of Hong Kong, with strong ties to various nations, these polyglot filmmakers
clearly bring a cosmopolitan sensibility to their work. However, the specifically gendered nature of that
cosmopolitanism needs further study. The contradictory nature of the cosmopolitan vis-à-vis the
deracinated, the diasporic, and the postcolonial hybrid complicate any investigation of how women
filmmakers negotiate the global within the local and regional cinematic marketplace. Working through
Kant and Marx, drawing on Pheng Cheah, Homi Bhabha and Kwame Anthony Appiah, I look at the way in
which these filmmakers navigate and interrogate the contradictions of being a cosmopolitan woman in
Hong Kong in their screen narratives.
DAVID MARTIN-JONES  University of Glasgow
Dussel and the ethics of intercultural encounters: Tambien la Lluvia/Even the Rain
In the 2000s, Film Studies has followed the turn to ethics taking place in various disciplines, with
Emmanuel Levinas a key figure in explorations of ethical relationships in cinema. However, Enrique
Dussel, a Latin American philosopher whose ethics develops upon that of Levinas, remains unexplored.
Dussel’s work offers Film Studies a different historical and political dimension to its exploration of ethics,
in particular in relation to World cinemas. It is especially useful when analyzing how intercultural
interactions are increasingly explored in films about the impact of globalization on different parts of the
world. Dussel’s position is informed by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems analysis, and critiques
western notions of ontology in light of five hundred years of colonization. As such it can be engaged with
contemporary positions on globalization, such as that of Arjun Appadurai. This paper analyzes Tambien la
Lluvia/Even the Rain (2010), an international coproduction which conflates the sixteenth-century
colonization of the Americas with contemporary neoliberal practices impacting on the same areas. A
Dusselian view of this film illustrates how such Latin American philosophy can help us to both reconsider
the ethics of intercultural interaction in films, and also present possibilities for constructing alternative,
transnational histories of cinema.
JAY JAMES MAY  University of York
The fretful cosmopolitan: London as the centre of the world in minor London cinema
1959-65
In this paper I will map the relationship between two aspects of cultural assimilation in London in the
1960s. The first aspect concerns the assimilation of minority cultures into a reinvigorated sense of national
identity evidenced in the policies of successive, cross-party national and local authorities since the end of
World War II. The second aspect concerns the assimilation of representations of these cultures into the
institutional cinematic canon. In order to sketch this cartography of cultural shift, I will discuss the early
work of two migrant London filmmakers: the Jamaican Lloyd Reckord and the Hungarian Robert Vas.
Both filmmakers produced remarkable yet hitherto neglected works of minor London cinema supported by
British Film Institute Experimental Film Fund.
LUCY MAZDON  University of Southampton
Continental films for cosmopolitan viewers: French cinema in Britain
The history of the distribution, exhibition and reception of French film in Britain reveals the construction
of a very particular type of ‘continental’ cinema. In a British market long dominated by Hollywood, French
films are consistently the most widely distributed non-English language work. However French cinema
appears to undergo a transformation as it reaches Britain, becoming something quite different to that
experienced by audiences at home. The ways in which French cinema has been positioned and perceived in
Britain are not, of course, the result of happenstance. Indeed they are closely bound up with the broader
British cultural, political and cinematic context. In this paper I will highlight some of the key individuals,
organizations, publications and discourses instrumental in creating a place for French cinema in Britain. I
shall go on to suggest that while apparently constructing a thoroughly cosmopolitan space of circulation
and a cosmopolitan viewer, these discourses and agendas were arguably instrumental in curtailing and
negating the diversity of ‘continental’ cinema.
JANE MILLS  University of New South Wales
Negotiating difference and coexistence in Milos Forman’s Taking Off
For all their unsettledness, cosmopolites do at least learn about the larger world and may become more
sensitive to cultural diversity than does the person who refuses to leave the hearth (Yi-Fu Tuan, 1996). The
absconding teenagers in Milos Forman’s Taking Off (1971) are determined to leave the hearth to explore
the larger world. Their bewildered parents are determined they should stay put and, as they frantically
search for their offspring, encounter strangers to whom they offer kindnesses. The film’s journeyings to
and from the hearth in this intergenerational battle suggest cosmopolitanism as a valuable framework to
explore openness and reticence to difference, and consciousness and oblivion to worldliness. They further
offer a means to explore cosmopolitan exchanges beyond the film’s formal properties and production
processes. A recent migrant to the USA from Czechoslovakia, in his first English-language film Forman
hoped to offer an outsider’s view of his new homeland. Traces of other foreigners with similar aspirations
are also present: Kafka, whose novella Amerika (originally titled The Missing Person) Forman had
previously contemplated adapting; Tocqueville whose Democracy in America likened democratic
government to a protective parent keeping citizens as perpetual children. This paper discusses how Taking
Off illuminates a fundamental cosmopolitan willingness to make the effort to negotiate difference and
coexistence with others when there appears to be no common values, only mutual incomprehension and
suspicion.
RICHARD MISEK  University of Kent
Remixing the city: public and private media space in Los Angeles Plays Itself
This paper explores remix cinema as a space in which images from diverse sources can interact to form a
‘media heterotopia’. It does so with specific reference to Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003).
Andersen’s film engages with the diverse forms of filmmaking that have historically taken place in Los
Angeles; it also engages with the diverse cultures that have historically inhabited the city. At the same
time, the film is far more than an example of cinematic cosmopolitanism. By treating mainstream and
alternative cinemas as equals, and by engaging with cultures that are usually only granted bit parts in media
representations of the city and in the city itself, Los Angeles Plays Itself manifests a heterotopianism that
Los Angeles itself lacks. Yet, like all heterotopic spaces, it must still negotiate its existence within
capitalism. Though much of the film focuses on public spaces, once mediated, public property becomes
intellectual property. Andersen was unable to secure clearance for the images he used; his film became a
‘trespass’ into private space, and remains commercially unreleased. But could such ‘trespassing’ provide
inspiration for new forms of urban activism, and could it be used to help reclaim what David Harvey refers
to as ‘the right to the city’?
STEPHEN MORGAN  King’s College London
Cosmopolitan commonwealth(s) and the Australian films of Ealing Studios
Over the course of the fifteen tumultuous years following World War II, five films made in Australia by
the ‘quintessentially British’ Ealing Studios represent aspects of transition: from the rural to the urban, the
collective to the individual, the selfless to the selfish, and, in a general sense, from a British past to an
American future. Through the lens of these five films, this paper will explore the changing social realities
in both Australia and the UK, building on concepts of cinematic transnationalism to consider how microsocieties are manifested, and how they might constitute an understanding of the British Commonwealth of
Nations as a cosmopolitan endeavour in the context of settler colonies. Featuring characters removed from
their local/national context and forced to confront their human universality, these are films torn between
the national impulses of Australia and the postcolonial anxieties of postwar Britain. As such, they provide a
unique setting in which to explore the Commonwealth project and the nexus between (a deficient)
political/institutional cosmopolitanism and (an aspirational) cultural/civic cosmopolitanism, as well as the
concurrent struggle between the national and the universal. Films covered are The Overlanders (Harry
Watt, 1946), Eureka Stockade (Harry Watt, 1949), Bitter Springs (Ralph Smart, 1950), The Shiralee (Leslie
Norman, 1957) and The Siege of Pinchgut (Harry Watt, 1959).
MATILDA MROZ  University of Greenwich
Cosmopolitan memories and haunted spaces: images of the Polish-Jewish past
This paper examines the notion of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ in relation to screen culture addressing aspects
of the Polish-Jewish past that have only recently been brought to light. Levy and Sznaider (2002) have
argued that shared memories of the Holocaust might provide the foundations for the emergence of
cosmopolitan memories that transcend ethnic boundaries. In exploring this notion, I will focus on the
screen-based responses to emerging awareness of an event that took place in Jedwabne in 1941, when
Polish villagers burned alive over 300 of their Jewish neighbours. Examining how Derrida’s ‘hauntology’
has been appropriated for studying screen memories by Alexander Etkind et al., I will chart Polish
cinema’s preoccupation with spaces ‘haunted’ by the Jewish past, including in the first feature film about
Jedwabne, Aftermath (Wladyslaw Pasikowski, 2012). I will argue that media discourse around Jedwabne
has created a transnational platform for visual artists and filmmakers to create ‘cosmopolitan memories’,
looking specifically at the video works of Yael Bartana (an Israeli artist who represented Poland at the
2011 Venice Biennale) and the work of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose controversial statue of Adolf
Hitler praying is currently installed on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto.
MEENASARANI MURUGAN  Northwestern University
An exotic pipe dream: re-orienting early US television history
As scholars of Orientalism and Hollywood cinema have interrogated how the space of the picture palace
imbued the medium with an imperial power dynamic (Browne, Higashi, King Bernstein & Studlar, Shohat
& Stam), this paper investigates how the space of television, as it is imagined on and off screen, pushes
beyond the material realities of the suburban household in which it was domesticated in the 1950s.
Television at once transported home audiences to strange locales, brought strange locales and people into
the home, and was itself a stranger in domestic space. By considering exoticism on US television, as well
as television as an exotic phenomenon and/or object, the medium as well as its space of transmission can
be seen as being imagined beyond the borders of not only the home and suburb but also the nation. For this
paper I will focus on early advertisements for television sets and networks and show how they carry with it
the histories of empire. This marketing of television was in tension with and complemented its potential as
a global medium of communication and education – and at its best – mediation and understanding. By
emphasizing how exoticism was deployed in advertising early television, I hope not only to offer an always
already global history of US television, but also to demonstrate the imbrication of technology and the
decorative in new media.
LÚCIA NAGIB  University of Reading
Sounding the cosmopolitan frame
Brazilian cinema’s latest sensation, Neighbouring Sounds, unravels an archaic situation of class
exploitation from within the contemporary cosmopolitan setting of a property boom. The recurrent utopian
sea of Brazilian cinema has become a remote sight in sprawling Recife, the coastal capital of Pernambuco
state. The city is becoming walled up in tower blocks that obstruct any view of the outside world, whose
distorted image nonetheless seeps in through barred windows, TV sets and other narrower screens. Only an
old rancher, now profiting from the property development in his own neighbourhood, takes the risk of
diving into the shark-infested sea. His own descendants, enclosed in their apartments, have to satisfy their
sensual needs with electric appliances, like the housewife who climaxes with the spinning of her washing
machine. Meanwhile, children’s balls bounce over high walls, sounds leak from courtyard to courtyard and
nightwatchmen spy on and blackmail everybody. A pair of lovers ventures into a derelict countryside, only
to find the ruins of a cinema. In light of this immensely insightful film, this paper will investigate the
relationship between the verticalization fever spreading across cosmopolitan centres and the relentless
miniaturization of cinema into ever-decreasing frames that hint at its end.
PAUL NEWLAND  Aberystwyth University
We’re like grass: The New World, cosmopolitanism and the cinema of hospitality
This paper argues that Terrence Malick’s retelling of the mythical story of Pocohontas (Q’orianka Kilcher)
and Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) in The New World (2005) can be read as a philosophical enquiry
into emotional, visceral and aesthetic forms of cosmopolitanism. The film gestures towards
cosmopolitanism through its evocation of the possibilities of an inclusive moral universe based on shared
mutual respect, empathy, dignity and loyalty. Drawing on the ideas of Kant, Levinas and Derrida, among
others, the paper posits that the film recognizes and engages with the obligation to respond to the ‘Other’,
and explores ways of facilitating this – through responsibility, goodness and charity, as well as through
instinct, gesture and touch. But I also want to argue that as it does this, The New World develops
cosmopolitan aesthetics. It is an example of what I want to call the ‘the cinema of hospitality’. The images
invite the spectator to experience the world anew, while the soundscapes work to warmly welcome the
listener into a pantheistic universe. The film thus might be held up as a torchbearer for a type of
representational cosmopolitanism which might reflect some of the views of Ulrich Beck, who sees true
cosmopolitanism as an acknowledgement of cultural difference and the otherness of the future, nature, the
object and other rationalities.
JOSEPH OLDHAM  University of Warwick
Anxieties of cosmopolitanism in British clandestine television serials, 1979-89
This paper analyzes a growth in anxiety towards cosmopolitanism in British clandestine serials from 1979,
which I argue is a delayed meditation upon imperial decline. Whereas espionage-themed series of the
1960s such as Danger Man and The Saint had typically maintained traditions of imperial adventure fiction,
depicting British men travelling around the world solving problems, from the late 1970s serial clandestine
fiction tended to take a more critical view of both British institutions and the spaces and influences of other
nations. A new strand of prestige spy serials, including Tinker Tailor Solder Spy (BBC, 1979) and Game,
Set and Match (ITV, 1988), cast divided Europe as a threatening place prone to sporadic outbursts of
violence. Concurrently, a new cycle of conspiracy thrillers showed suspicion towards western geopolitical
alliances, for example, Bird of Prey (BBC, 1982-84) displayed anxiety that European integration would
bring the influence of European organized crime, whilst Edge of Darkness (BBC, 1985) and A Very British
Coup (BBC, 1988) meditated upon Britain’s status as a subordinate partner in the USA’s Cold War nuclear
strategy. Collectively, I argue, such serials address imperial decline more directly than their 1960s
predecessors, an anxiety that typically manifests in a defensive siege mentality.
TOM O’REGAN  University of Queensland
Between networks and value: cosmopolitan networks and parochial content in local and
international production
Two aspects of contemporary screen production – peripatetic international production (sometimes
inaccurately called Hollywood ‘runaway production’) and international production companies increasingly
undertaking nationally-oriented production – are generally thought of in terms of globalization and the
reorganization of the national. The default has been a political economy understanding. This paper
considers how the rubric of the cosmopolitan intersects with such political economy understandings. It
focuses on how producers and policymakers grounded in places prepare, organize, participate in and make
sense of these distinct kinds of production. How can distinctions between ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘local’ agents
– whose length and breadth of professional and personal networks vary – make sense of international flows
of people, formats and programmes? And how do screen judgements of value, which often endorse texts
with ‘cosmopolitan’ dimensions and criticize those with ‘parochial’ orientations, connect with production
milieux which are cosmopolitan in their professional networks and in the provenance of their output but
produce ‘parochial’ output? This paper teases out how network-agency, value and other cosmopolitan
perspectives might productively re-describe and provide a vantage point on globalizing developments in
which international norms, perspectives, formats and interchange are insistently present.
DOROTA OSTROWSKA  Birkbeck, University of London
Cannes Cinefondation: international film festivals as producers of World cinema
In recent years, major international film festivals have established special funds and residence programmes
which aim at supporting filmmaking projects from ‘developing countries’ (The Hubert Bals Fund,
Rotterdam), ‘transition countries’ (World Cinema Fund, Berlin) or simply those of ‘the next generation of
international filmmakers’ (Cinefondation, Cannes) at different stages of their development. The purpose of
my paper is to understand how these festival funds, in particular Cannes’ Cinefondation, have contributed
to the development of the category of World cinema which consists of films made by transnational auteurs
who come from the developing countries (Latin America in particular) or find themselves marginalized in
their country of origins (such as Romania). These auteurs have an ambiguous relationship with the film
culture in their countries of origins but come to represent these countries’ cultures internationally. I argue
that theirs are festival films whose production is driven by the arthouse cinema ethos rather than by the
indigenous film production context. Since international film festivals are the most important exhibition
space for these films, theatrical distribution in the director’s country of origins is a highly desirable
outcome but not the absolute necessity. Rather these films are the product of and live within the
international festival circuit and aim at the cinephilic audiences invested in this particular kind of World
cinema.
LYDIA PAPADIMITRIOU  Liverpool John Moores University
Cosmopolitanism and the Balkans: on the impossibility of living together
The paper will focus on two internationally acclaimed art films made in the mid 1990s in response to the
war in ex-Yugoslavia, Milcho Manchevski’s Before the Rain (1994) and Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses’
Gaze (1995). Both are transnational productions that are also firmly grounded in a distinct national space:
Macedonia (FYROM) and Greece respectively. Contemplative, and rather abstract in their allusions to the
contemporary realities of war, both films avoid taking sides in the conflict, foregrounding instead a sense
of entrapment and tragedy. The films precede recent debates on cosmopolitanism that developed
predominantly in the 2000s, after the postcommunist realities began to settle and the intense migratory
movements that they initiated became increasingly representative of an ever more mobile and fluid world.
The paper will explore the extent to which these films, both of which are narratively and historically
positioned at a moment of trauma, can be seen to (retrospectively) reinforce or question the cosmopolitan
project. More specifically, it will explore each film’s central character (Aleksandar and A, respectively)
and the articulation of their encounters with a series of ‘strangers’. It will also trace the two directors’
distinct trajectories as transnational/cosmopolitan auteurs, and their simultaneous positioning in the context
of their respective national cinemas.
LISA PARKS  University of California Santa Barbara
Mapping orbit: toward a vertical commons
Orbit is home to a satellite meta-infrastructure that enables telecommunication, direct broadcasting, remote
sensing, and global positioning around the planet. Satellites are used to relay radio, television, telephone
and internet signals, to monitor the earth’s surface for weather reports, natural resource development, and
military campaigns, and to support navigation on land, in air and at sea. While many people have
encountered satellite TV, remote sensing imagery or GPS navigation, strikingly few understand how orbital
space is structured to make such practices possible. The mapping of orbit involves specifying the locations
of orbital paths, satellites and earth stations that make up this global infrastructure, rendering movements
and activities that occur between earth and orbit, recognizing the disparate political interests of orbital
players such as military agencies, telecommunication firms, and non-profit organizations, attending to
problems of scale and speed, and acknowledging satellites and orbital events as part of world history.
Drawing on international treaties, critical scholarship and orbital maps I argue that orbit should be thought
of as a contested vertical commons. Since physical occupations of orbit are impossible for most, struggles
over this domain must take place within the symbolic economy and within screen cultures. Using an array
of examples, I demonstrate the kinds of knowledges and critical questions that orbital maps can generate,
while also pointing to their limitations. The mapping of orbit cultivates a structure of feeling I refer to as
‘invisible adjacency’, which involves the capacity to recognize the presence and significance of a material
field, object and/or body without directly sensing or perceiving it. Orbit thus becomes a space for thinking
through the politicization of the imperceptible and for understanding how phenomena come into discursive
relations.
MARIA-PAZ PEIRANO  University of Kent
Towards a ‘cosmopolitan’ national film industry: contemporary Chilean cinema at
international film festivals
This paper explores the construction of a Chilean national cinema in the transnational context of film
festivals. It examines how localism and cosmopolitism are articulated not only in the cinematographic
images of Chilean films, but also in the social practices associated to international film circulation. The
paper looks at transnational negotiations of Chilean filmmakers, where each ‘locality’ is intersected by
National, Latin-American and European social networks. I argue that international film circulation
contributes to reconfigure the images of a national cinematography, which is enacted through transnational
practices of reception and exchange. The filmmakers’ trajectories are entwined with an overlapping set of
cultural meanings, reflecting a certain tension between cosmopolitism and localism. Recently there has
been an increasing deterritorialization and delocalization of national film production, mainly due to a
change in Chilean cultural politics, which have the aim of making national cinema ‘for export’. The set
definitions of what is ‘local’ are being reshaped, while Chilean agents negotiate the cosmopolitan
experience of film festivals and those national modes of production. Films display a certain
‘Chilean/cosmopolitan’ aesthetic, which despite of being successful in the festival circuit, it tends to be
disconnected from Chilean national audiences.
DUNCAN PETRIE  University of York
Cosmopolitanism and postwar British film culture: the case of Karel Reisz and Carl
Forman
While the significance of émigrés to the development of British cinema has been widely acknowledged and
explored, the focus of much of this work has been on the period from the1920s to the 1940s. In this paper I
want to consider the contribution of two ‘outsiders’ during the postwar period. Karel Reisz escaped to
Britain from Czechoslovakia in 1938 at the age of twelve, while the blacklisted American screenwriter and
producer Carl Forman arrived in the mid 1950s. In addition to their filmmaking achievements, both were
active in the encouragement of new talent and the promotion of the wider importance of the moving image.
Reisz was a critic for Sequence and Sight and Sound, a programmer at the National Film Theatre and the
author of an acclaimed book on film editing; while Foreman served as a governor of the BFI and like Reisz
was a member of the Lloyd Committee that made the case for the founding of a National Film School. His
advocacy also led to BAFTA naming its award for Best British Newcomer after him. In considering the
contribution of both men, this paper will demonstrate how émigrés continued to play a key role in the
maintenance of a transnational and cosmopolitan British film culture during the 1950s and 1960s.
ANDREA PÓCSIK  Pázmány Péter Catholic University
Cultural scenes of resistance: cosmopolitan spectatorship
Since the change of system, Roma representation in Hungary has gradually become a politically and
academically overused catchphrase blurring its real meaning: the visibility and invisibility of Roma people
in public life (cultural, political, art and other scenes) and in the media in general. In the framework of a
course development project (PATTERNS Lectures) as a guest lecturer at ELTE University, Budapest, I
have the opportunity to maintain and develop the tradition of a Media Studies course organized in a
documentary film club open to the public (www.romakepmuhely.hu). I firmly believe that universities
should be ‘permanent places for cultural resistance’ (Immanual Wallerstein). The seminar-film clubs as
meeting points for Roma and non-Roma students and intellectuals, opportunities for public debates about
‘otherness’ in film and media are crucial cultural scenes of cosmopolitan life. In my paper I intend to
analyze and interpret the renewal of this old tradition, how it is enriched with political importance by
heightening awareness toward the right to minority representation, informing students about the importance
of Roma community media, familiarizing them with the intellectual, cultural and political achievements of
the Roma intelligentsia in Hungary, marking new directions in academic research, undermining existing
power structures.
PHIL POWRIE  University of Surrey
The transnational soundtrack in contemporary French cinema
In 2003 I hypothesized that contemporary French films are increasingly using anglophone songs in their
compilations. A recent survey of a large sample of films that I have recently undertaken suggests that
something like 30% of the 2250 or so films produced since 2000 are likely to be dominated by Englishlanguage songs. This paper explores the use of English-language songs in a small sample of these films
using a range of strategies: the film that has a large number of almost exclusively English-language songs;
the film that has very few, but where the songs are all the more striking; the film where songs are sung in
English by French singers; and finally the film which demonstrates how English-language and Frenchlanguage songs work in counterpoint. This last comparative element of the paper allows me to claim that
the use of English-language and French-language films in contemporary French cinema functions in very
different ways. The former’s function is to define a contemporary space and culture, while the latter’s
function is to retrieve a communitarian past in nostalgic mode.
LISA PURSE  University of Reading
Between spatial illegibility and situatedness: the phenomenology of the action sequence
This paper addresses recent developments in debates about the contemporary action sequence, which have
emerged in print (Shaviro, 2010; Rombes, 2009) and online in the blogosphere and on video essay websites
like PressPlay and Audiovisualcy (Stork, 2011, 2012; Emerson, 2011; Nye 2011; Grey, 2011). Throughout
these various responses, the audiovisual intelligibility of action through space is at issue; for some, it
signals the manner in which the action sequence has become more avant garde, for others it demonstrates
the bankruptcy of popular film style. Drawing on a number of recent action sequences as case studies, this
paper will interrogate both the designation of spatial intelligibility and its proposed primacy in the
experience of the action sequence, by suggesting a mode of analysis that prioritizes embodied spectatorship
and a flexible conception of situatedness over notions of audiovisual coherence. In this way the paper will
work towards a phenomenology of the action sequence, arguing for a more inclusive and nuanced
conception of action cinema’s sensory address.
LAURA RASCAROLI  University College Cork
Street view: European routes, cosmopolitan takes
A central element of the cosmopolitan is access to spaces that are experienced as universal in scope, but
that may also confront us with the sheer difficulty of the self–world axis. The cinema is one such space, as
an apparatus that creates desiring visions of other worlds, and as a narrative device that plunges us to street
level, thus projecting us into sometimes uncomfortable spaces which are experienced viscerally, if still
symbolically. Focusing on fictional, documentary and essay films (including Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre
[2011], Marc Isaacs’s The Road: A Story of Life and Death [2012] and Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the
Wolf ([2009]), this paper engages with contemporary European films in which streets and roads are
constructed as layered palimpsests of histories, memories and peoples, and subjectivity as an imbricated
relationship with the world that works along both synchronic and diachronic axes. Read through the lens of
a visceral cosmopolitanism, the street becomes a locus for empathetic encounters with otherness. But it is
also a nexus of desire and anxiety that mobilizes a distinctively cinematic experience of a cosmopolitanism
of difficult transformations. In each of these ways, these films allow us to probe ideas of Europe and of its
sustainability from within some of its most everyday practices and its most travelled routes.
DAVID RICHLER  Carleton University
From the outside looking in: festival spectatorship, DVD paratexts, and the crossplatform cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
International film festivals are marked by the allure of cosmopolitan ‘foreignness,’ providing for the
willing spectator a similarly mediated encounter with Otherness afforded by travel. Like other forms of
cultural tourism, festivals address spectators as insiders– – armchair travellers whose cinematic journeys
are guided by the programmers and curators introducing the films, and, via post-screening Q&A sessions,
press conferences, and masterclasses, by the filmmakers themselves. Today, these discussions are typically
recorded, uploaded to the internet and included on DVDs as bonus features, giving viewers located beyond
the festival circuit access to the director’s insights, the impression of receiving an insider’s look behind the
scenes, and a sense of mastery over the foreign text. To help elucidate this decidedly cosmopolitan mode of
spectatorship and uncover its limitations, my paper will examine how the Thai film Tropical Malady and
its short companion piece Worldly Desires (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004/2006) formally and
thematically anticipate their transnational circulation on the festival circuit and subsequent repackaging on
DVD. My interest lies in how Apichatpong’s films, and the paratexts which circulate alongside their
international and domestic receptions, both reinforce and challenge the insider-outsider dichotomy that
characterizes the film festival – and ‘World cinema’ more generally – as a touristic phenomenon.
IAN-MALCOLM RIJSDIJK  University of Cape Town
Between Sherwood Forest and the Red Sea: South Africa imagined in Hollywood during
the 1920s
In the mid 1920s, Paramount studios produced a location map identifying areas around California that
would be suitable geographical facsimiles for parts of the world, from Siberia in the north to the Sahara
desert in the south. Sandwiched between the Red Sea and Sherwood Forest is South Africa, distinct from
Africa and the Nile River (which are located further north). South Africa’s position begs several questions:
what was Paramount shooting in the silent era that required a distinctly South African setting or was South
Africa a staging ground for a variety of genres with an African savannah backdrop? Of further interest is
the way Hollywood sought to frame the world in its own backyard, expanding the synthetic geography of
the studio back lot to include a cosmopolitan mise-en-scène. Drawing on historical resources and theories
of the representation of national identities on film, this paper will consider both the construction of ‘place’
in the early Hollywood studio years (and Paramount in particular) and South Africa’s position as narrative
and aesthetic ‘place’ in Hollywood.
MIRIAM ROSS  Victoria University of Wellington
Stereoscopic debris: affective moments in 3D cinema
Stereoscopic (3D) media has received increased attention in the last five years. In the same period that 3D
blockbusters, such as Avatar (2009) and The Avengers (2012) broke box-office records, the 2012 Olympics
and Queen’s speech were broadcasted on 3D television sets, YouTube developed 3D viewing options and
stereoscopy was added to a number of portable media devices such as the Nintendo 3DS. Viewers are thus
increasingly familiar with stereoscopy’s unique qualities, particularly the negative parallax effect that
allows objects to appear in front of the screen plane. While derided by some critics as a gimmick and hailed
by others for its pleasurable spectacle, negative parallax produces a distinct aesthetic quality not available
elsewhere. This paper will explore one particular use of negative parallax across recent 3D films:
stereoscopic debris. By examining the way films project a flow of small, multiple objects towards the
auditorium space (exploding material, embers, sparks, dust clouds, bubbles, jetsam) I will address the way
affective relationships are created between viewers and screen content. In doing so, I will consider the way
these objects represent the breakdown or destruction of a unified film object in a manner true to the origins
of the term debris.
KATHRIN ROTHEMUND  see MATTHIAS CHRISTEN
RICHARD RUSHTON  Lancaster University
Society in the films of the Dardenne brothers: escaping from a minority
The central characters in the films of the Dardenne brothers all exist, in one way or another, outside
society. They are the leftovers, the detritus who have fallen through the cracks, beyond the organizations,
laws, rules and regulations of the civil order. However, the challenge of these films is not for their
characters to show us the ways in which the rules and regulations of contemporary European societies are
negative, constraining, oppressive and exclusionary. Rather, what is at stake for the Dardennes is to show
that these outsiders lack lives and hope precisely because they are excluded from society – the illegal
immigrants and Igor in La promesse (1996), Rosetta in Rosetta (1999), the couple in L’enfant (2005),
Lorna in The Silence of Lorna (2008), the young boy in The Kid with a Bike (2011) …. The true discovery
these characters make is to try to find ways into society, to escape their lot so as to live inside the dominant
society. I take up these observations in the light of Jacques Rancière’s claim that ‘This is what
‘emancipation’ means. It means escaping from a minority’.
PHILIP SCHLESINGER  University of Glasgow
Reflections on the constitution of a national film agency
This plenary lecture will reflect on a current piece of Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded
research into the rise and fall of a national film agency, the UK Film Council. Using a case to make points
of more general pertinence, I shall interrogate the creation of a national agency and show how the empirical
findings uncovered require us to think both through and beyond the national level. After some
methodological considerations, I shall discuss the ways in which elite decision-making and policy networks
produced a specific articulation of the national with the transnational in the formation of the new body, in
line with currently fashionable logics of modernization.
SABINA SHAH  University of Manchester
Animating Muslim women’s agency
Conceptions of Islam post-9/11 conducive to European views on veiling have led to scholarly debates on
representation. Scholar-activists discuss media coverage and western scholarship to view the Muslim
woman as an oppressed mute victim that also ‘asserts or implies that Islam itself oppresses women’
(Wadud 2000). The aim of this study is to illustrate an alternative visual perspective to that of the
oppressed Muslim woman stereotype. The key question driving my inquiry is whether established
stereotypes might be subverted, and if so in which ways and to what effect? As such, this study is inspired
by Muslim women’s activist-scholarship to create a framework within practice-as-research. My own
practice takes the form of animation to recover a historical narrative of a Muslim woman who ruled as
Sultan in India and used Islam to maintain her human and god-given rights. Animation opens the possibility
to use expressive language by visualizing concepts that translate academic ideas beyond the written word
for wider dissemination. This cine-dialect evokes an attractive means to portray Muslim women’s agency
that might appeal to a wider audience. Therefore, visual practice might offer a means to share frequently
ignored viewpoints considerate of a multicultural society in order to challenge gender prejudice in the
context of Islamophobia.
DEBORAH SHAW  University of Portsmouth
European funding for Latin American filmmakers: the cases of Carlos Reygadas and
Claudia Llosa
European social funding bodies, a number of which are aligned with film festivals, have been instrumental
in the co-production of some of the most high profile recent Latin American films. The focus of this paper
is on two award-winning Latin American directors, Carlos Reygadas from Mexico and Claudia Llosa from
Peru, who have received funding from the Dutch Hubert Bals Fund, and the German World Cinema Fund.
Reygadas’s film Japón/Japan (2002) and Batalla en el cielo/Battle in Heaven (2005) received funding
from the Hubert Bals fund, while his Stellet Licht/Silent Light (2007) was partly financed by the World
Cinema Fund. Llosa’s films, Madeinusa (2006), and La teta asustada/The Milk of Sorrow (2009), were
awarded grants from the World Cinema Fund. The analysis in the paper will be guided by the following
questions: how are space and place projected in films chosen and designed from their conception for
international audiences at and beyond festivals? How are regions and cities presented in films by Reygadas
and Llosa for these audiences? The paper will ask whether the local displaces the national, and whether the
national is configured as absent in films that recreate landscapes and cities to be visually consumed
globally.
SALMA SIDDIQUE  University of Westminster
Partition and the cosmopolitics of Shorey comedies
The romantic comedies produced and directed in Bombay by a refugee-migrant filmmaker Roop K. Shorey
were popular fare in both India and Pakistan from the late 1940s to mid 1950s. While the 1947 Partition of
India underpinned Shorey’s personal loss and relocation, the subsequent years of collective trauma were
also the context for the circulation of his comedies. The main attraction of these films was the actress
Meena, and her persona as the girl with gumption. Meena, working in Bombay, became Roop’s wife.
Belonging to different religious communities that were cast in positions of acute antagonism, Roop and
Meena Shorey’s marriage and decade-long cinematic collaboration demonstrated a cosmopolitan
subjectivity, which was increasingly under strain from the tightening national allegiances. This presentation
examines the coping functions of these films given the dislocating experience of national formation in the
Indian subcontinent. As the films imagined new ways of being and belonging through nonconformist
gender dynamics, the real life alliance of Meena and Roop Shorey also informed the reception and
discussion of these films. While parochial claims of community and nation brought an end to the Meena–
Roop partnership, their Bombay collaboration evidences the attempts to reaffirm a cosmopolitanism that
was among the many casualties of Partition.
ROCHELLE SIMMONS  University of Otago
From margins to circles: Berger and Tanner’s cosmopolitanism
John Berger’s work has been seen as exemplifying both the cosmopolitan and its opposite: the vernacular.
Berger and Alain Tanner’s films The Salamander (1971), The Middle of the World (1974) and Jonah who
will be 25 in the Year 2,000 (1976) are similarly contradictory and give equal emphasis to worldliness and
place. Drawing upon Lefebvre’s theories of everyday life in its depiction of the vernacular, Berger and
Tanner’s trilogy focuses on specific local environments. It also explores the subjectivities of characters
who are underprivileged and constrained, although they are able to imagine other ways of being. In The
Salamander, Rosamonde is uneducated and unemployable, because she rejects alienating work. She is in
constant motion. Her most defining movements are circular, since she seems to embody a revolutionary
consciousness. Rosamonde thus corresponds to Sheldon Pollock’s definition of a cosmopolitan, as
someone who engages in ‘ways of thinking, feeling and acting beyond one’s particular society.’ Within the
larger discussion about globalization, Berger and Tanner’s films serve to provincialize Europe and to reject
the margins-to-centre model for one in which centres, or circles, are everywhere. Although indisputably
local, they also propose a cosmopolitan perspective.
ANNA SLOAN  University of Warwick
Colonial representation in 1950s Hollywood: a spatial and geographical reading of two
early widescreen films
This paper examines the revival of the travelogue aesthetic in Hollywood in the early 1950s. Very popular
as a form during the early years of cinema, the travelogue experienced a comeback in the early 1950s
associated with the advent of widescreen technologies like Cinerama and CinemaScope. John Belton
(1992) and others have commented that the travelogue format was a natural fit for showing off
widescreen’s possibilities for visual pleasure and authenticity of representation. This paper will interrogate
this claim through close readings of This is Cinerama (Merian C. Cooper, independent, 1952) and Three
Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, Fox, 1954). I find that, much more than simply being a ‘natural fit’
for the new widescreen media, these films are precisely tuned to the task of proving the power of
widescreen through claiming inheritance of the early film travelogue’s racist, imperialist worldview, in
which the film camera’s technological gaze is highlighted through its spatio-visual subjugation of faraway
peoples and places. In This is Cinerama, this technological gaze coalesces around the figure of a
controlling, powerful white American male narrator, while in Three Coins in the Fountain it is oriented
towards the American woman through discourses of the picturesque and romance. This paper thus begins
to explore the spatial and geographical aspects of gendered subjectivities in 1950s Hollywood, opening up
a colonialist reading of American cinema in this era.
IAIN ROBERT SMITH  University of Roehampton
Global travels of Bollywood song and dance: ‘Jaan Pehechan Ho’ from Gumnaam (1965)
to Heineken’s The Date (2011)
In 2011, Heineken launched a deliberately cosmopolitan advertisement campaign titled ‘The Date’, which
featured a young couple visiting an East Asian restaurant, participating in Chinese shadow theatre, drinking
Heineken, and dancing to the Bollywood song ‘Jaan Pehechan Ho’. The advert closed with the words:
‘Open your world’. Drawing on Edward K. Chan’s work on the reception of Bollywood music in the West,
and Kaushik Bhaumik’s research on the position of Bollywood within World cinema, this paper will
consider this advertisement in relation to the global travels of ‘Jaan Pehechan Ho’ – looking at the ways in
which this musical number from Gumnaam (1965) has also been utilized in films such as Ghost World
(2001) and covered by US musical groups such as Heavenly Tem Stems and Mexican Drug Patrol. By
examining the controversy surrounding these US appropriations of the song, the paper will explore the
broader debates regarding cultural (in)authenticity when western culture borrows from India. Framing this
through Henry Jenkins’s concept of ‘pop-cosmopolitanism’, the paper will ultimately consider the cultural
politics surrounding the global travels of the Bollywood song and dance sequence.
JO STEPHENSON  Queen Mary, University of London
London as a ‘host’ city: cosmopolitanism and cultural export promotion in British media
coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games
In the 2012 Olympic Games, the national, the transnational, the global and the multicultural were thrown
together on a world media platform. The identity of this cosmopolitanism was in the title – ‘The London
2012 Games’. This concept of cosmopolitanism was connected explicitly to the identity of London, the
‘host’ city, with visual icons of the capital being interspersed throughout the media’s coverage of the
Games. It is interesting here to look at what elements of local (London) and national (British) identity have
been connected in British media coverage to this idea of London and Britain as cosmopolitan centeres, in
particular the focus on British cultural exports of music, literature, film and fashion. The promotion of
these cultural exports draws on a tradition in British filmmaking going back to postwar Public Information
Films. This paper will analyze the promotion of these exports, particularly of the British Fashion Industry,
in British media coverage of the 2012 London Olympic Games and its relationship to the projection of
London as a cosmopolitan landmark. I will then contextualize this analysis in relation to British film and
media tradition. This research forms part of an AHRC funded thesis on the use of British film and media to
promote the branding of Britain and the British Fashion Industry since the 1940s.
MELVYN STOKES AND MATTHEW JONES  University College London
Cultural memory and British cinemagoing of the 1960s
We are currently undertaking an AHRC-funded research project which seeks to collect and analyze the
cultural memories of a diverse sample of people who went to the cinema in 1960s Britain to demonstrate
what light the experience of cinemagoing sheds on broader questions of how the decade is remembered and
interpreted. To many commentators, 1960s films embodied many of the changes transforming British
society. They reference acts and orientations that were illegal in Britain until 1967, including abortion and
homosexuality. So-called British ‘new wave’ films explored the frustrations and aspiration of workingclass, provincial young people. These were followed by the ‘swinging London’ films of the mid 1960s. To
some, cinema played a key role in constructing as well as representing images of 1960s society, with films
such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960) and Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965) and
stars such as Julie Christie and Michael Caine becoming icons of the decade. However, the films
themselves tell us nothing about how they were received and remembered. Using oral history techniques
and questionnaires, our project explores how 1960s films have linked up in memory with constructions of
gender, ethnicity, class and sexual orientation. Our presentation introduces the project and reports its early
findings.
ALENA STROHMAIER  University of Vienna
Animation in films of the Iranian diaspora
Being by definition a cinema that originated from marginalized collectivities that are negotiating their place
in the social fabric of hegemonic host societies, migrant and diasporic cinema is centrally concerned with
identity politics and the ‘other’. Inscribed in these films is the collective memory of the migratory
experience, which has had a profound impact on the cultural identity and the aesthetic sensibilities of
migrant and diasporic filmmakers. The main question to explore is: how are migration and diaspora being
represented? The films of the Iranian diaspora are fragmented, multilingual, and self-reflexive, dealing with
doubled, crossed and lost characters involving themes of journeying and historicity. Referring to diaspora
as a travelling term reflecting the importance of movement and circulation, this paper aims to take a closer
look at how identities are shaped towards the use of animation in two documentaries produced outside of
Iran: Ali Samadi Ahadis’s Green Wave (Germany, 2010) and Caveh Zahedis’s The Sheikh and I (USA,
2012). Both films use fragments or sequences of animation to create the basis for more politically
outspoken discourse. Shifting between globalization, multiculturalism and transnationalism, this paper will
discuss the cosmopolitan aspect of animation.
HIAW KHIM TAN  University of Chicago
Props and the image: broaching the issue of production design in classical Hollywood film
Stanley Cavell wrote an essay in 1978 that asks at the outset, ‘What happens to objects in films?’ and
whether ‘one accept[s] the suggestion that there is a particular relation […] that holds between things and
their filmed projections, which is to say between the originals now absent from us (by screening) and the
new originals now present to us (in photogenesis).’ Scholars of cinephilia (Keathley, Ray, Stern) have
examined some of the aesthetic issues surrounding that particular configuration of objects and
‘photogenesis’; I propose an exploration of the more prosaic end of the question, namely, how do these
objects end up in the film, who selects them and places them there, and how do certain objects of
decoration come to prominence within the image, and come to be taken as significant in the interpretation
of a film? Part of this process has to involve a look at the role of planning, design and creation in the preproduction stage of a film, which means understanding the roles taken on by the production designer and
set decorator in relation to the production, and to the director and cinematographer. Thus, to give a wellknown example from Hollywood cinema of the 1950s, that of the image of Marylee Hadley (Dorothy
Malone) clutching the miniature oil-well on her father’s desk in Written on the Wind (1956) – why is this
prop considered significant, while in another film (Back Street [1961]) of the same period, genre, and
studio (personnel), a miniature representation of the Eiffel Tower, used in a similar manner to signal
‘location’ (Paris) remains merely a prop to be passed over as décor in the film?
ROSIE THOMAS  University of Westminster
Aladdin’s Indian adventures: cosmopolitan modernity and Indian fantasy films
The Arabian Nights were a major force in early twentieth-century transnational popular culture circuits.
This body of fantastical stories – which originated in India and evolved across Arab and European cultures
over several centuries – inspired both high and low cultural forms in Europe and America, influencing
theatre, dance, fashion and, importantly, early cinema. The Nights became an integral part of cosmopolitan
modernity. Indian art forms also embraced the Nights with enthusiasm: ‘fantasy’ and ‘jadoo’ (magic) films
were staples of India’s silent cinema and continued to draw large audiences on the C-grade circuits until the
1960s. But India’s relationship to these tales of enchanted ‘other’ places was complex: Indian filmmakers
drew as much on Urdu qissa-dastaan traditions and Parsi theatre as on Hollywood, and their films created
their own imaginary, quasi-Islamicate, orient. Taking the examples of Aladdin and Alibaba, both
successfully remade throughout Indian cinema history, this paper explores the complex series of
appropriations involved in bringing these curiously hybrid, transnational tales to Indian popular audiences.
From Hiralal Sen’s 1903 Alibaba to Homi Wadia’s 1952 Aladdin, how did the imaginary worlds of the
fantasy films relate to internationally fashionable orientalist forms? What might these films have meant to
their subaltern Indian audiences?
LESHU TORCHIN  University of St Andrews
Porous borders: geopolitics and genre in John & Jane
This paper analyzes the film John & Jane (Ashim Ahluwalia, India, 2005), addressing its formal
characteristics and genre play as means of illustrating the flows of economic globalization and its human
impact. Situated in a cycle of remote labour films, the documentary provides a useful corrective to human
trafficking narratives that conflate global migration with criminality and moralize the security-based laws
that increase border control and migrant surveillance. Indeed, today’s national borders are not simply
rendered porous to flows of people, but also to flows of finance, labour and culture, which smuggle in their
own dangers. John & Jane’s story of call centre workers renders visible these new circuits of global traffic
and their impact, while its experimentation engages the instability of borders, both generic and geopolitical.
In doing so, the documentary finds threat not in the movement of people but in the coercive forces of
mainstream industrial sectors, and the human subject at the centre of this traffic.
JULIE TURNOCK  University of Illinois
Monsters are real: genre and the transnational visual effects business
The USA has long dominated the visual effects (VFX) industry. However, with the increasing affordability
of digital technology, the international VFX business has broadened significantly in the last decade.
Though still dominated by the major transnationals like ILM and Weta, economies initially exploited for
cheap labour have begun producing science fiction films that have gained worldwide attention. Prominent
examples include The Host (South Korea, 2006), District 9 (South Africa, 2008), and Attack the Block
(UK, 2011). Audiences’ genre familiarity with these films, combined with spectacular and professional
digital effects, have become a new route to global prominence for filmmakers, in a way that can largely
circumvent traditional festival marketplace paths to international distribution. Likewise, digital effects that
had previously been economically unfeasible for local production are now available for new creative
expression. The economic exportability of genre filmmaking has provided a venue for productions
worldwide to insert their own local product into the transnational economy of the Hollywood blockbuster –
in effect, creating a product with comparable production values and therefore analogous exchange value –
while at the same time deploying the same high-tech tools to tell stories, air concerns, and create fantastic
environments that chime with their ‘home’ audience.
AMBROSE UCHENUNU  University of Calabar
Nollywood: from guerrilla filmmaking to guerrilla film marketing and the loss of movie
distribution powers
From the stables of an itinerary stage performance troops of Ojo Ladipo to Hubert Ogunde and Moses
Olaiya, Nigerian cinema has come a long way and in like manners of many cinematic cultures of the world
that had their humble beginnings from live theatrical performances. There was however, a disconnect in the
case of Nigeria as the country moved straight into film production in 1970 followed by a deluge of
filmmaking on celluloid in the 1980s. This lasted for barely that decade culminating in a decline and zero
production until filmmaking made a reappearance in 1992 on video branded Nollywood, spelling a new
phenomenon as a cosmopolitan entertainment experience. In the absence of movie theatres due to the
decline of all aspect of cinema, Nollywood filmmakers adopted a guerilla film marketing strategy to beat
pirates. There was success on this initiative, but the table seemed turned and pirates came back with
vengeance taking movie marketing to a new dimension. This work will look into the problems that affected
the distribution of Nollywood movies and what strategy is being adopted to incorporate the street vendors
so that Nollywood does not follow the way of movies on celluloid in Nigeria.
ROSA URTIAGA  Universidad de Zaragoza
Violence and global ethics in Bordertown: debating cosmopolitanism
Gregory Nava’s film Bordertown (2006) tells a story of violence: the story of more than five hundred
Mexican women violently murdered since 1993 in Ciudad de Juarez. Most of the victims worked at the
maquiladoras, the assembly line, export-processing production system that epitomizes global neoliberalism
along the US–Mexico border. Facing the lack of response by local and state authorities, civil society
worldwide has tried to raise awareness and stop the killings. The film suggests that political violence in
Juarez is highly influenced by the global forces derived from the 1994 North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) and the maquila industry. Gerard Delanty has stressed the salience of
cosmopolitanism for an understanding of the challenge of globalization. At the same time, he argues,
violence is one of the key questions facing global ethics, which represents one major dimension of
cosmopolitanism, and a form of sociocultural transformation. In this paper, I will try to show that
Bordertown dramatizes what Delanty calls ‘the cosmopolitan concern with the engagement with the
perspective of the Other’, which is central to global ethics as cosmopolitan solidarity.
AIDA VALLEJO  University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and Autonomous
University of Madrid (UAM)
Festival translations: documentary production and cultural exchange within Europe
In the last twenty years, a network of festivals specializing in documentary film has spread around the
globe. From being a showcase for films, these festivals have shifted to multi-level events in which the
convergence of industry interests with distribution networks offers a new arena for the production of
creative documentary films. In this context, the development of documentary projects has been conditioned
by the cultural hierarchies within Europe, where northern and western production companies and public
television networks invest in films at the development stage, in a process of searching for universal topics
for international audiences. In this paper I will analyze the cultural and economic dynamics which are
played through festival agendas in order to understand the influence of these events as spaces of cultural
exchange, not only between films and audiences, but also between filmmakers and producers. Taking the
trajectory of the Polish-German co-production Rabbit à la Berlin (Królik po Berlinsku, Bartek Konopka,
2009) as a case study, I will focus on the influence of the cultural interactions which take place during the
different production stages to reflect on the various powers which shape the contents and aesthetics of the
films throughout their career to achieve an international distribution.
STEFANIE VAN DE PEER  University of St Andrews
Fragments of war and animation: documentaries by Syrian and Lebanese women
Animation is infiltrating the representation of reality in animated documentaries. In this paper I will
address the meaning of animated fragments in live-action documentary films. I want to look specifically at
what these fragments add or change to a documentary and how they influence the viewing experience.
Addressing issues of the war film, and with the help of film clips and references to social networking as a
platform for experiments with animation in the Middle East, I will analyze Dahna Abourahme’s Ein El
Hilweh/Kingdom of Women (Lebanon, 2010) and Soudade Kaadan’s film Damascus Roofs: Tales of
Paradise (2010). Both documentaries use animation to enhance understanding and deepen engagement
with war-related topics and events that are necessarily situated beyond a transnational audience’s
knowledge and experience. War is a permanent fixture in many films from the Middle East, and it has also
determined major developments in cultural expression. This paper will situate the films in the wider
context of animation and documentary developments in Syria and Lebanon, and look specifically at the
women active in these forms. My close analysis illustrates the role and function of the hybrid form as a
means through which filmmakers and their subjects who have experienced war and trauma, express
themselves newly.
MARIA VELEZ-SERNA  University of Glasgow
Cinema programming as a cosmopolitan practice in 1910s Scotland
While a film is reproducible and potentially ubiquitous, each show is a localized and unique event.
Distribution and programming practices thus enact the power shifts between the local and the international
dimensions of the film trade. Studying how these practices changed in the process of emergence of
institutional cinema, in the years around World War I, sheds light on the forces that shaped the experience
of cinema for audiences around the world. This paper will ask where the films that Scottish audiences saw
in the 1910s came from, tracing trends such as the rising dominance of American productions and looking
at variations of programming practice geographically and across price categories. Presenting a quantitative
analysis of a sample of Scottish programmes, I will argue that first-run city-centre cinemas did not
necessarily have the most cosmopolitan programming policies. Because of its size and relative position, the
Scottish market will be presented as an appropriate arena to study the effect of pressures from the
production sector on exhibition and reception, through the transition to longer, more expensive films and
exclusive distribution.