Border Cinema

The rise of digital media and globalization’s intensification since the 1990s have significantly refigured global cinema’s form and content. The coincidence of digitalization and globalization has produced what this book helps to define and describe as a flourishing border cinema whose aesthetics reflect, construct, intervene in, denature, and reconfigure geopolitical borders. This collection demonstrates how border cinema resists contemporary border fortification processes, showing how cinematic media have functioned technologically and aesthetically to engender contemporary shifts in national and individual identities while proposing alternative conceptions of these identities to those promulgated by the often restrictive current political rhetoric and ideologies that represent a backlash to globalization.

The rise of digital media and globalization’s intensification since the 1990s have significantly refigured global cinema’s form and content. The coincidence of digitalization and globalization has produced what this book helps to define and describe as a flourishing border cinema whose aesthetics reflect, construct, intervene in, denature, and reconfigure geopolitical borders. This collection demonstrates how border cinema resists contemporary border fortification processes, showing how cinematic media have functioned technologically and aesthetically to engender contemporary shifts in national and individual identities while proposing alternative conceptions of these identities to those promulgated by the often restrictive current political rhetoric and ideologies that represent a backlash to globalization.

Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,0, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Department of English and American Studies), language: English, abstract: The Mexican Revolution of the 1910s alone is considered to have inspired some hundreds of border films, mostly documentaries and docudramas. The Mexican film industry has a nearly equally long history of representing the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. According to Norma Iglesias-Prieto, one of the leading scholars in the field of Mexican border cinema, more than 300 border films were produced in Mexico between 1936 and 1996. “By the 1930s, Mexican producers were beginning to view the border as a profitable theme for Mexico’s national film industry” (Iglesias-Prieto 1998). Referring to Iglesias-Prieto’s classic book-length study "Entre yerba, polvo y plomo: Lo fronterizo visto por el cine mexicano" (1991), Fregoso argues that Mexico produced 147 border films in the decade between 1979 and 1989 alone (cp. 2003). Charles Ramírez Berg also points to a boom in 'cine fronterizo' in the 1980s: "Border films have flourished on the lowest end of the economic and aesthetic Mexican moviemaking scale for decades. The 'narcotraficante' film, a Mexican police genre, is the most popular (...)

In tandem with a postnational imaginary which is nurtured by the ever-present promise of deterritorialized mobility and burgeoning migratory fluxes, walls and fences separating nation-states multiply. This is a burning issue: even though nation states at the centre of the global order increasingly present themselves as postnational, calls for tighter border security undermine utopian notions of both a borderless New Europe and the USA as the Promised Land. This collection investigates the urgent issue of borderscapes and the cinematic imaginary by bringing together a range of new approaches in the field of film and media studies, crossing over into sociology, migration studies and artistic research. The contributions focus on the interrelated motifs of borderscapes as they are represented and used in transnational cinematographies, from Palestine to Sweden, Spain, Finland, Italy, Iran, Iraq, France, the UK and US, and as constituting premises of cinematic production. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Transnational Cinemas journal.

In recent years, Mexican films have received high acclaim and impressive box-office returns. Moreover, Mexico has the most advanced movie industry in the Spanish-speaking world, and its impact on Mexican culture and society cannot be overstated. Mexico's Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers is a collection of fourteen essays that encompass the first 100 years of the cinema of Mexico. Included are original contributions written specifically for this title, plus a few classic pieces in the field of Mexican cinema studies never before available in English. These essays explore a variety of themes including race and ethnicity, gender issues, personalities, and the historical development of a national cinematic style. Each of the book's three sections-The Silent Cinema, The Golden Age, and The Contemporary Era-is preceded by a short introduction to the period and a presentation of the major themes addressed in the section. This insightful anthology is the first published study that includes pieces by Mexican and North American scholars, including a piece by the internationally acclaimed essayist Carlos Monsivais. Contributors include other acclaimed scholars and critics as well as young scholars who are currently making their mark in the area of film studies of Mexico. These authors represent various fields-community studies, film studies, cultural history, ethnic studies, and gender studies-making this volume an interdisciplinary resource, important for courses in Latin America and Third World cinema, Mexican history and culture, and Chicana/o and ethnic studies.

The chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema present a rich, diverse overview of Canadian cinema. Responding to the latest developments in Canadian film studies, this volume takes into account the variety of artistic voices, media technologies, and places which have marked cinema in Canada throughout its history. Drawing on a range of established and emerging scholars from a range of disciplines, this volume will be useful to teachers, scholars, and to a general readership interested in cinema in Canada. Moving beyond the director-focused approach of much previous scholarship, this book is concerned with communities, institutions, and audiences for Canadian cinema at both national and international levels. The choice of subjects covered ranges from popular, genre cinema to the most experimental of artistic interventions. Canadian cinema is seen in its interaction with other forms of art-making and media production in Canada and at the international level. Particular attention has been paid to the work of Indigenous filmmakers, members of diasporic communities and feminist and LGBTQ artists. The result is a book attentive to the complex social and institutional contexts in which Canadian cinema is made and consumed.

This comprehensive study of prolific British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom explores the thematic, stylistic, and intellectual consistencies running through his eclectic and controversial body of work. This volume undertakes a close analysis of a TV series directed by Winterbottom and sixteen of his films ranging from television dramas to transnational co-productions featuring Hollywood stars, and from documentaries to costume films. The critique is centered on Winterbottom's collaborative working practices, political and cultural contexts, and critical reception. Arguing that his work delineates a 'cinema of borders', this study examines Winterbottom's treatment of sexuality, class, ethnicity, and national and international politics, as well as his quest to adequately narrate inequality, injustice, and violence.

Now in its sixth edition, this essential guide for students provides accessible definitions of a comprehensive range of genres, movements, world cinemas, theories and production terms. This fully revised and updated book includes new topical entries that explore areas such as film and the environmental crisis; streaming and new audience consumption; diversity and intersectionality; questions related to race and representation; the Black Lives Matter movement; and New Wave Cinemas of Eastern European countries. Further new entries include accented/exilic cinema, border-cinema, the oppositional gaze, sonic sound and Black westerns. Existing entries have been updated, including discussion of #MeToo, and more contemporary film examples have been added throughout. This is a must-have guide for any student starting out on this fascinating area of study and arguably the greatest art form of modern times.

This collection of ten chapters and three original interviews with Québécois filmmakers focuses on the past two decades of Quebec cinema and takes an in-depth look at a (primarily) Montreal-based filmmaking industry whose increasingly diverse productions continue to resist the hegemony of Hollywood and to exist as a visible and successful hub of French-language – and ever more multilingual – cinema in North America. This volume picks up where Bill Marshall’s 2001 Quebec National Cinema ends to investigate the inherently global nature of Quebec’s film industry and cinematic output since the beginning of the new millennium. Through their analyses of contemporary films (Une colonie, Avant les rues, Bon cop, bad cop, Les Affamés, Tom à la ferme, Uvanga, among others), directors (including Xavier Dolan, Denis Côté, Sophie Desrape, Chloé Robichaud, Jean-Marc Vallée, and Monia Chokri) and genres (such as the buddy comedy and the zombie film), our authors examine the growing tension between Quebec cinema as a “national cinema” and as an art form that reflects the transnationalism of today’s world, a new form of fluidity of individual experiences, and an increasing on-screen presence of Indigenous subjects, both within and outside the borders of the province. The book concludes with specially conducted interviews with filmmakers Denis Chouinard, Bachir Bensadekk, and Marie-Hélène Cousineau, who provide their views and insights on contemporary Quebec filmmaking.