PWAD 435 Final Flashcards
Nafici & the gaze
- Distinction of public & private
- In the home the woman has to be veiled because a male cinematographer is in the home
- If the woman is veiled then the every space becomes public
- How can a film be realistic if the woman is veiled in the home
What are the problems with talking about the veil?
- Modesty applies to men and women
- Not monolithic
- Gender means different things to different women
The woman has the power to veil and unveil
- Space and character
In the past the veil was a social not religious marker
Inversion of the gaze - women can look and not be looked at
Filming the Modern Middle East, 81-104, (Khatib)
Woman as nation metaphor = women become the battleground of national struggles
Women constructed as biological reproducers of members of an ethnic group
And reproducers of boundaries of ethnic groups
Reproducers of collectivity and transmitters of culture
Signify national difference
- Nations are contested systems of cultural representation
- Gender is one of the most powerful ways nations define themselves
- The male stands in for the nation - American or other while women are the cultural construction of the Arab nations
Hill 24 doesn’t answer
- The death of the protagonists is allegorically compensated for by rebirth of the country - the ultimate protagonist
- Self sacrifice for the homeland
- Arabs are abstract collective, Israelis are individuals who forma collective consciousness
- Western-connected characters = connection to the west
- Assumed intimacy and sympathy of us vs them
How does bashu subvert the veil
The woman has the power to veil and unveil
- Space and character
- Inversion of the gaze - women can look and not be looked at
When we first see the mother, she is veiling herself
Language in Bashu
- Mother speaks only Gilaki
- Boy speaks arabic
- There is disorientation
- If the woman can’t speak the language, is it part of the nation
- In the English subtitles in the letter correspondence
- “Let the boy be your helper”
- “Let him be your right hand”
- Because you have lost the right hand
The husband in bashu
He is absent but asserts control
He is an amputee
- Trope of men who are emasculated
- Association of disability with impotence
He appears from behind the straw man
- A non-man
Shemer - The aesthetic economy of death
The films discussed here resort to the aesthetic economy of death to provide not a reflection on socio-political disorder manifested by the abhorrence of terrorism, but an exploitation of cinematic order to reflect on cinema itself and the white screen onto which we can project our fantasies.
Terrorism then enters the playful reality of the simulacrum (representation) where “the image consumes the event…it absorbs it and offers it for consumption
Shemer - The Hilarity of Evil
- Terrorism becomes a Hollywood spectacle
- I.e. a cinematic device
- We see this in paradise now
- Something serious becomes cinematic/entertainment
- Leads to the depoliticisation of an event
Sexuality in Yacoubian building
- Wound - associated with vagina
- Crime, blood, interrogator who is a rapist lying with him when they are shot
- Unrequited love - the only way their relationship is consummated
Paradise Now plot
West Bankers Khaled and Said are recruited to carry out a suicide bombing mission inside Israel. The original plan goes awry and, at the end, only Said climbs into an Israeli bus with an explosives belt strapped to his body.
Most of the film is believable
Last scene extreme close up
- Body fragmentation
Symbolise vs represent the nation
- Men represent the nation, women symbolise it
- Symbolism is displacement
- Body of the nation: Mixed race coupling and immigration become readable as forms of rape and molestation, the invasion of the body and the nation - evoking the vulnerable body of women and children
Paradise now
- Anti wedding film
- Everything fails - there is not consummation
- It is about failed narrative - the impossibility of Palestinian narrative
Also anti-road movie
- Should be a journey from problem to solution
- It is anti-journey - they keep going and going back and failing
Features of exilic cinema
- Borders and movement
- In-betweenness
- Multi-lingual
- Reliance on funding (relate to the aesthetics of hunger)
- Problems of access
- Coproduction
- Incorporating multiple perspectives
- Filmmakers taking on different roles
- Disembodiment - shattered identity and impossibility to harness the identity
- Epistoleric cinema - the voice disconnected from the person - letters or VoiceOvers
- Void and absence as main characters/thematic presence. Void links to longing
- Absence becomes a structuring voice/principle
- Challenge to univocal address
The Pain of Giving Birth to Kurdish Cinema
Bahman Ghobadi
- A director in a country where the film industry is still stuttering
Another reason: he is Kurdish
- “The Kurds do not have an instant of happiness - tea have a knot in their throat. They want to scream but they cannot”
- History of exodus/history of people on the move
- This and cinema in common - cinema is an act of movement
what does it mean Kurdish cinema is a pregnant woman?
- “One must help her to give birth… one cannot let her die”
- it should be protected
- Perhaps that birthing a national cinema is labour intensive and involves pain
