-
rLrvr ntJ|[-/Elr]
as if it might acquire, a state of its own, with the
sul:scrlucnt prornisc of full cultural citi-zenship, access to
p.rimary school, emproymentand all. 0fteri, ,l"r"r" uri"nuted,
upr.ooted,wandering populations may vacillate i"t*".., diverse
"p,i".r,-"r-rir"y -uy oftu., .orr.to a provisional rest at-one or
another temporary and transitional cultural resting
place.,,Gellner, Nations and Nat ionalism, 46.
32. I thank Gina Marchetti for this succinct formulation.33'
Back in 1992 in an_interview with yash chopra, a leading Bombay
industry flrmmaker,I asked whv Hindi films, otherwise prerr-"a to
rrurru; #;;oi,u, nuo never rep_resented Hindu-Musrim romance
siories. srightly ararm;;;,il;tion, chopra spec_ulated such a
repre_s_entation wourd p.rotu riots. Ironical ly, Bombay, the first
firm totrnsgress the rigid Hindu-Muslim divide, was made on the
heels of the worst riots since
ifJXHl'^;l iltill":r the desecrmion or the nrt";;;i,";;"r*y
Musrim *o.q,.,
34' The farmers' movement gathered momentum in several states
beginning in the lateI970s (despile differencei among them).
Maharashtra,s Sharad Ioshi arriculares itsviews most clearly: the
acutely ri"r".r Jevelopment of ,.b;;;;;;ural areas is builtinto
nationar plans, siphoning off .".or..", from the countryside,
concentratingwearrh in urban centrs, and
iilpoveri.hi;;th";;;.r"ir'iJit.yria". This sen-
Iirii::H;l.or,n" anti_Nar'mada au,,,tou"_"nt thar gained
international atren_35' sumita chakravarty, Nationar Identity in
Indian popurar cinema, rg4z_BuAustin: un!versity ofTexas press,
fg93), l4l.36' Colonial history began to be used as the central
narrative only in the l9g0s. 1g42 A LoueSrory (Vinod Vidhu Chopra,
1994) is , ,igrrin;u.rt
"ruTplg: Covertly, of .or..., anythingwestern, perhaps due to
the coroniar puJ, i. constantly vilifled through portrayars
ofhe_$:nirlljadence'
rhis is consist".,i*irt, Hirai .i,r"*ul-"-u-iiliul."r".".,."s ro
rhe37' Akbar s' Ahmed noin11
911t that-Nadira's performance in Aan isfashioned after
MarleneDietrich's in Kismet (r944J. see rris "no*af rilms: The
cirr"-u u.-u"iaphor for IndianSociery and politics," Modern asian
Sruiiesia,, GsSz), zst.
" fl?l?Jt ilffif.::::""d bv sanssters from their consriruency
marking their territory and
39' Rameshwari and Angela Koreth, "The Mother Image and the
National Ethos in Four Re_cent Mainstream Hindi Fitms: pratighaar
(netribrion, r9sil, "-ij*n,.,
t990), Amba(1990) and prahaar (Attack, l99l).,, lp", pr".".rted
at the fvrirarrJ uoise coltege semi_nar, Universityof Delhi, April
1992.40' In the short story "Toba Tek singh," set in the.days
leading to the partition, the epony_mous protagonisr is localed in
a pakistani asyru, *r,i.r,l?""i."il;;;p"rr. saner lhanlhe rest of
(he subcontinent. The ,*o.,urll'o".ide ro transfer asyrum inmates
to thecountry of their relatives' choosing. Toba Tek singh resists
,rru ,rurr.r". ,o an asylum in
i:i,,:,::l dies in a no_man,s_ta.,db"t*u", the two uoraur"
ti,uil,
"rli,rr", rndia nor
4l'
womenwhoaresexuallyharassedbymenonthestreetsoftensucceedinchastisingthemby
invoking men's rerationshrps *rtn trrei, oirrers and sisters.
42' As Rameshwari andAngelaKoreth argue, ,,what seems enabring
in pratighaatcould alsobe disturbing. . . the overvaruation wiich
aris from deiflcation . . . the mythic substruc_ture which ensures
the success and gloriflcation of an action or individual, also sets
itapart as ' . . special, as something that only the unique
individual -"rt"a by divinity iscapable of' It could sig-nal
passivily ana -"t .o-priance for the rest who are not
marked:#Ji1"^'*iii'rT;
"'"o.; o'.,",,t"d "rir."-rrai.""aa House cir"gili"ar,
university
43.
N^r,tcY ]
It is perhaps this urban middle-class bias in the women's
movement thil t llftltltlll wil|llFt rpolitically active in rural
areas to begrudge the disproportionate attentioit lrn1l l1
r111r,ctic violence-dowry and dowry deaths, rather than land and
proper.ty righin,
HAM I D NAFICY
Situating Accented CinemaFRoM An Accented Cinema
Born in Iran, Hamid Naficy (b. 't944) emigrated to the United
states in r964 and ls currently John Evans Professor of
Communication at Northwestern University School ofCommunicatlon,
where he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Art
History.A leading authority on Middle Eastern cinema and
television, he has been awarded fel-lowships from the American
Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment forHumanities,
and the Social Science Research Council. He edited the critically
acclaimedvolume Home, Exile, Homeland: Fitm, Media, and the
politics of ptace (r99g) and is the au-thor of The Making of Exile
Cultures: lranian Television in Los Angeles(r993) and An
AccentedCinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (zoor).
Naficy's work reflects the growing importance of global-or more
exactly, transnational-cinema today. While Hollywood films continue
to dominate cinema in most of the world,the increasing number of
world film festivals and the wide availability of films throughDVD
distribution and other technologies have added exponentially to the
circulation offilms from a considerable variety of cultures. This
new visibility and popularity includesemerging, and previously
marginalized, cinemas, such as those from senegal, lran,
southKorea, and Latin American nations, bringing into view the
films of ousmane sembne,Abbas Kiarostami, Lucrecia Martel, and many
others. ln addition, transnational films bydirectors working
outside their country of origin like the work of Armenian
CanadianAtom Egoyan, New Zealand's Jane Campion, Taiwanese American
director Ang Lee, andDanish filmmaker Lars von Trier have entered
the mainstream. ln very different ways,international co-productions
travel the globe for locations, themes, and distinctive
stylLs,creating perspectives that cross borders in many different
ways.
ln the introduction to An Accented Cinema, "situating Accented
Cinema,', Naficy con-siders filmmakers from emerging or
postcolonial countries that have moved to ,,northerncosmopolitan
centers" since the r96os and established innovative, often
critical, per-spectives on their new cultures. For Naficy,
"accented cinema" is a distinctive branchof postmodern film, one
that typically enacts what he calls the ,,politics of the
hyphen,"that is, a doubly defined identity and perspective. Still,
while some versions of postmocl"ernism describe a fully
destabilized world without origins or certainties, accented
filmsoften retain and rely on a sense of a past homeland that
anchors their visions. Historie ally,Naficy distinguishes two
periods of accented filmmaking: the r95os to the r97os,
whendecolonization around the world transformed many nations and
cultures; and the tggos
-
through the r99os, when postindustrial economies arounrl tirc
world reconfigured globalpopulations. Naficy then suggests that
there are three types ol'accented cinema and film-makers,
particularly evident in the latter phase: exilic filmmakers who
were forced to leavetheir native country; diasporic filmmakers who
retain a sense of loss or nostalgia for theirhomeland; and
postcolonial ethnic filmmakers who see themselves as both displaced
andplaced within a new homeland.
lf Fernando solanas and octavio Getino's "Towards a Third
Cinema" (p.gz+) inaugu-rated postcolonial cinema studies, Naficy's
work attends to the complex cultural formsthat have arisen in the
wake of neocolonialism, globalization, migration, and
technologi-cal change. Trinh T. Minh-ha (p.6sr) is an example of
the filmmakers whose work Naficyilluminates.
READING CUES & KEY CONCEPTSl!* What does Naficy mean by his
suggestion that mainstream Hollywood films are,,accent
free"?
&i While we all recognize accented speech, consider
carefully and describe concretelywhat it means to describe a
narrative or visual style as r...rt"d.
r* Consider Naficy's claim that "exilic and diasporic accent
permeates the film,s deepstructure: its narrative, visual style,
characters, subject matter, theme, and plot.,'whatdoes he mean by
this statement?
{,F Key concepts: subaltern; rnternal Exile; External Exile;
chronotope; Diaspora;Politics of the Hyphen; Hybridity; Accented
Style; Group Style
Situating Accented Cinema
Accented FilmmakersThe exilic and diasporic filmmakers discussed
here are "situated but universal,,figures who work in the
interstices of social formations and cinematic practices.A majority
are from Third world and postcolonial countries (or from the
globalSouth) who since the 1960s have relocated to northern
cosmopolitan centerswhere they exist in a state of tension and
dissension with both thir original andtheir current homes. By and
large, they operate independently, outside the studiosystem or the
mainstream film industries, using interstitial and collective
modesof production that critique those entities. As a result, they
are presumed to bemore prone to the tensions of marginality and
difference. while they share thesecharacteristics, the very
existence of the tensions and differences helps preventaccented
filmmakers from becoming a homogeneous group or a film movement.And
while their films encode these tensions and diffeiencs, they are
not neatlyresolved by familiar narrative and generic schemas-hence,
their grouping undeiaccented style. The variations among the films
are driven by many factors, whiletheir similarities stem
principally from what the filmmakers have in common:Iiminal
subjectivity and interstitial location in society and the fllm
industry. what
',.;lilrrlps tlrl trt:r:r:trtgrl style is llrc
r:orrrlritrittitltr atttl itttcrsct:tirltt ol lltr",r'r',rt t,t
I ronri ir rttl sirtt ilarities.t.t:r:rrtccl [ilrnmakers came to
live and make fllms in the Wcst itt lwrr 1|'tt''r,rl
1ir,rr,irrgs.'l'hefirstgroupwasdisplacedorluredtotheWestfromtlttr
lrtlt'l'l'rll'rllrlrr.riritl-1970sbyThirdWorlddecolonization,warsofnationalliberatiott,
Iltllirrvlr'luri.rr's invasions of Poland and Czechoslovakia,
Westernization, alttl it hlttrl rrl',rrrtr.rrr1l decolonization" in
the West itself, involving various civil rigltts, ( olrlrlr'l
r rrltrl'1, and antiwar movements. Indeed, as Fredric Jameson
notes, tho hrrgirrrrlrr;i
ol
rlrt:lteriodcalled"thesixties"mustbelocatedintheThirdWorlddecoltlttiz'itliorrtlrrl
s6 pr.ofoundly influenced the FirstWorld sociopolitical movements
(19tt4' lll(l)I'lrc sr:cond group emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as
a result of the failurc ol rr;r
llrrurlism, socialism, and communism; the ruptures caused by the
emergertt:l ol
lxrstindustrial global economies, the rise of militant forms of
Islam, the returtt ol
r,'ligious and ethnic wars, and the fragmentation of
nation-states; the changes in t lrtr
tirrropean, Australian, andAmerican immigration policies
encouraging non-Westertt
irrrrrrigration; and the unprecedented technological
developments and consolida-
tion in computers and media. Accented filmmakers are the
products of this dualpostcoloniai displacement and postmodern or
late modern scattering' Because of
ilrcir displac"-nt from the margins to the centers, they have
become subjects in
world history. They have earned the right to speak and have
dared to capture the
nleans of representation. However marginalized they are within
the center, theirirlrility to aciess the means of reproduction may
prove to be as empowering to tht:
rrrarginalia of the postindustrial era as the capturing of the
means of productktrt
would have been to the subalterns of the industrial era'It is
helpful, when mapping the accented cinema, to differentiate three
typcs
,l film that constitute it: exilic, diasporic, and ethnic. These
distinctions are llolSard-and-fast. A few films fall naturally
within one of these classifications, whilcthe majority share the
characteristics of all three in different measures. Within
eaclr
type, too, there are subdivisions. In addition, in the course of
their careers, manyfilmmakers move not only from country to country
but also from making one tyPe
of fl1m to making another type, in tandem with the trajectory of
their own travels ol'
identity and those of their primary community.
EXILIC FILMMAKERS
Traditionally, exile is taken to mean banishment for a
particular offense, with aprohibition of return. Exile can be
internal or external, depending on the location
io which one is banished. The tremendous toll that internal
exile, restrictions, clo-
privations, and censorship in totalitarian countries have taken
on filmmakers h:rs
teen widely publicized. What has been analyzed less is the way
such constraittts,
by challenging the filmmakers, force them to develop an
authorial style. Many {i lrrr
makers who could escape internal exile refuse to do so in order
to flght the gorrl
flght at home-a fight that often defines not only their film
style but also their itlcrt
tiiy as oppositional flgures of somc stature. Byworking under an
internal regitttc oI
"*it", tt .y choose their "site ol'stltrggle" and their
potential social transfortltitliott
(Harlow 1991, 150). When thcy spcak from this site at home, they
have an itttlrrtt.t,
evenif, and oftenbecausc, thcy arc ptrnishedforit. Infact,
interrogation, censorslrip'
-
u I lrI Iu r\Ar rur\AL Ar\1, rKANSt\Ar rut\AL rtLlvl
HtSt(rKtE5
and jailing are all proof that they have been heard. llu t i l'
I lroy nlovo ouI into oxle rnnlexile in the West, where they have
the political freecloln to speak, no one may hearthem among the
cacophony of voices competing for attention in the market. In
thatcase, Gayatri Spivak's famous question "Can the subaltern
speak?" will have to bcreworded to ask, "Can the subaltern be
heard?" Because of globalization, the inter.nal and external exiles
of one country are not sealed off from each other. In fact,there is
much traffic and exchange between them.
In this study, the term "exile" refers principally to external
exiles: individualsor groups who voluntarily or involuntarily have
left their country of origin and whomaintain an ambivalent
relationship with their previous and current places and cul-tures.
Although they do not return to their homelands, they maintain an
intense de-sire to do so-a desire that is projected in potent
return narratives in theirfllms. Inthemeantime, they memorialize
the homeland by fetishizing it in the form of cathectedsounds,
images, and chronotopes that are circulated intertextually in
exilic popu-lar culture, including in films and music videos. The
exiles' primary relationship, inshort, is with their countries and
cultures of origin and with the sight, sound, taste,and feel of an
originary experience, of an elsewhere at other times. Exiles,
especiallythose fllmmakers who have been forcibly driven away, tend
to want to define, at leastduring the liminal period of
displacement, all things in their lives not only in rela-tionship
to the homeland but also in strictly political terms. As a result,
in their earlyfllms they tend to represent their homelands and
people more than themselves.
The authority of the exiles as filmmaking authors is derived
from their position assubjects inhabiting interstitial spaces and
sites ofstruggle. Indeed, all great authorshipis predicated on
distance-banishment and exile of sorts- from the larger society.
Theresulting tensions and ambivalences produce the complexity and
the intensity that areso characteristic of great works of art and
literature. In the same way that sexual taboopermits procreation,
exilic banishment encourages creativity.l Of course, not all
exilicsubjects produce great orlasting art, butmanyof the greatest
andmost enduringworksof literature and cinema have been created by
displaced writers and filmmakers. Butexile can result in an
agonistic form of liminality characterized by oscillation
betweenthe extremes. It is a slipzone of anxiety and imperfection,
where life hovers betweenthe heights ofecstasy and confldence and
the depths ofdespondency and doubt.'Z
For external exiles the descent relations with the homeland and
the consent re-Iations with the host society are continually
tested. Freed from old and new, they are"deterritorialized," yet
they continue to be in the grip of both the old and the new,the
before and the after. Located in such a slipzone, they can be
suffused with hybridexcess, or they may feel deeply deprived and
divided, even fragmented. Lithuanianfilmmaker and poet |onas Mekas,
who spent some four years in European displacedpersons camps before
landing in the United States, explained his feelings of
frag-mentation in the following manner:
Everything that I believed in shook to the foundations-all my
idealism, andmyfaith in the goodness of man and progress of
man-allwas shattered. Some-how, I managed to keep myself together.
But really, I wasn't one piece any lon-ger; I was one thousand
painful pieces. . . . And I wasn't surprised when, uponmy arrival
in New York, I found others who felt as I felt. There were poets,
andfilm-makers, and painters-people who were also walking like one
thousandpainful pieces. (quoted in O'Grady 1973,229)
NArrLy 5r[uaung,qEElIruEIt (,tniim0 J ,El
Ncithcr the hybrid fusion nor the fragmentation is total,
permarlonl, r)t'ltallllFr,( )rr lhe one hand, like Derridian
"undecidables," the new exiles can bo "lrullr gtrtlrrcitlrer": the
pharmacon, meaning both poison and remedy; the hynrcrt,
iltHlillHlro(lr membrane and its violation; and the supplement,
meaning both adrlltlntt nrttllcplacement (quoted in Bauman 1991,
145-46). On the other hand, they could apllylrc called, in Salman
Rushdie's words, "at once plural and partial" (1991, I5). s
pat.tial, fragmented, and multiple subjects, these fllmmakers are
capable of protlttclttgrr rnbiguity and doubt about the
taken-for-granted values of their home and ltoill i{}.r:ioties.
They can also transcend and transform themselves to produce
hybrldknd,syncretic, performed, or virtual identities. None of
these constructed and inr;lttrnirlentities are risk-free, however,
as the Ayatollah Khomeini's death threat agrltrr*lSalman Rushdie
glaringly pointed out.3
Not all transnational exiles, of course, savor fundamental
doubt, strive to.ward hybridized and performative self-fashioning,
or reach for utopian or virtullimaginings. However, for those who
remain in the enduring and endearing crisesirnd tensions of exilic
migrancy, liminality and interstitiality may become passion-ate
sources of creativity and dynamism that produce in literature and
cinema thelikes of James Joyce and Marguerite Duras, ]oseph Conrad
and Fernando Solanas,lizra Pound and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Samuel
Beckett and Sohrab Shahid Saless, Sal-rnan Rushdie and Andrei
Tarkovsky, Garcia Mrquez and Atom Egoyan, VladimirNabokov and Raril
Ruiz, Gertrude Stein and Michel Khleifi, Assia Djebar and
JonasMekas.
Many exilic filmmakers and groups of filmmakers are discuss
edinlAnAccented,Cinemal-Latin American, Lithuanian, Iranian,
Turkish, Palestinian, and Russian.They are not all equally or
similarly exiled, and there are vast differences evenamong
filmmakers from a single originating country.
DIASPORIC FILMMAKERS
Originally, "diaspora" referred to the dispersion ofthe Greeks
after the destructionof the city of Aegina, to the Iews after their
Babylonian exile, and to the Armeniansafter Persian and Turkish
invasions and expulsion in the mid-sixteenth century.The classic
paradigm ofdiaspora has involved the Jews, but as Peters (1999),
Cohen(1997), Tllyan (1996), Clifford (L997,244-:77), Naflcy
(1993a), and Safran (1991) haveargued, the definition should no
longer be limited to the dispersion of the Jews, formyriad peoples
have historically undergone sustained dispersions-a process
thatcontinues on a massive scale today. The term has been taken up
by other displacedpeoples, among themAfrican-Americans in the
United States andAfro-Caribbeansin England, to describe their
abduction from their African homes and their forceddispersion to
the new world (Gilroy 1993, 1991, 19BB; Mercer 1994a, 1994b,
19BB;Hall 1988). In these and other recodings, the concept of
diaspora has become muchcloser to exile. Consequently, as Khachig
Tllyan notes, "diaspora" has lost some ofits former specificity and
precision to become a "promiscuously capacious categorythat is
taken to include all the adjacent phenomena to which it is linked
but fromwhich it actually differs in ways that are constitutive"
(1996, B).
Here I will briefly point out the similarities and differences
between exile anddiaspora that inform this work. Diaspora, like
exile, often begins with trauma, rup-ture, and coercion, and it
involves the scattering ofpopulations to places outside their
-
I FFE r ,tv raA r fvrrL A
lrotneland. Sotllclintus, lrowever, the scattering is cntrsud by
a desire for increased trade,for work, or fbr colonial and imperial
pursuits, Consecluently, diasporic movementscan be classi[ied
according to their motivating factors. Robin Cohen (1997)
suggestedthe following classifications and examples: victim/refugee
diasporas (exemplified bythe Jews, Africans, andArmenians);
labor/service diasporas (Indians); trade/businessdiasporas (Chinese
and Lebanese); imperial/colonial diasporas (British, Russian);
andcultural/hybrid diasporas (Caribbeans). Like the exiles, people
in diaspora have anidentity in their homeland beforetheir
departure, and their diasporic identity is con-structed in
resonance with this prior identity. However, unlike exile, which
may beindividualistic or collective, diaspora is necessarily
collective, in both its originationand its destination. As a
result, the nurturing of a collective memory, often of an
ideal-ized homeland, is constitutive of the diasporic identity.
This idealization maybe state-based, involving love for an existing
homeland, or it may be stateless, based on a desirefor a homeland
yet to come. The Armenian diaspora before and after the Soviet era
hasbeen state-based, whereas the Palestinian diaspora since the
1948 creation of Israelhas been stateless, driven by the
Palestinians' desire to create a sovereign state.
People in diaspora, moreover, maintain a long-term sense of
ethnic conscious-ness and distinctiveness, which is consolidated by
the periodic hostility of either theoriginal home or the host
societies toward them. However, unlike the exiles whoseidentity
entails a vertical and primary relationship with their homeland,
diasporicconsciousness is horizontal and multisited, involving not
only the homeland butalso the compatriot communities elsewhere. As
a result, plurality, multiplicity, andhybridity are structured in
dominance among the diasporans, while among the po-litical exiles,
binarism and duality rule.
These differencestendto shape exilic and diasporicfilms
differently. Diasporizedfilmmakers tend to be centered less than
the exiled filmmakers on a cathectedrelationship with a single
homeland and on a claim that they represent it and itspeople. As a
result, their works are expressed Iess in the narratives of
retrospection,loss, and absence or in strictly partisanal political
terms. Their films are accentedmore fully than those of the exiles
by the plurality and performativity of identity.In short, while
binarism and subtraction in particular accent exilic films,
diasporicfilms are accented more by multiplicity and addition. Many
diasporic fllmmakersare discussed here individually, among them
Armenians. Black and Asian Britishfilmmakers are discussed
collectively.
POSTCOLONIAL ETHNIC AND IDENTITY FILMMAKERS
Although exilic, diasporic, and ethnic communities all patrol
their real and sym-bolic boundaries to maintain a measure of
collective identity that distinguishesthem from the ruling strata
and ideologies, they differ from one another principallyby the
relative strength of their attachment to compatriot communities.
The postco-Ionial ethnic and identity filmmakers are both ethnic
and diasporic; but they differfrom the poststudio American ethnics,
such as WoodyAllen, Francis Ford Coppola,and Martin Scorsese, in
that many of them are either immigrants themselves orhave been born
in the West since the 1960s to nonwhite, non-Western,
postcolonial6migr6s. They also differ from the diasporic filmmakers
in their emphasis on theirethnic and racial identity within the
host country.
usllu Lilr.r[r I ,9I
'Ihe dil'lbrcut emphasis on the relationship to place creates
dil't'orotrtly BrlFtllFrllilms. Thus, exilic cinema is dominated by
its focus on there and thert ltt lltti lttllttoland, diasporic
cinema by its vertical relationship to the homelarrd anel lty llr
Iutet ulrelationship to the diaspora communities and experiences,
and postcolt)nll FtlIlUand identity cinema by the exigencies of
life here and now in the country ln whlt'hthe filmmakers reside. As
a result of their focus on the here and noq etlr trls
ltlnttlllyfilms tend to deal with what Werner Sollors has
characterized as "the ce nt rul d IH iltin American culture," which
emerges from the conflict between descent rulntlonltemphasizing
bloodline and ethnicity, and consent relations, stressing
sell'-lttado,contractual affiliations (1986, 6). In other words,
while the former is concernttcl wllltbeing, the latter is concerned
with becoming; while the former is conciliatory, tltfllatter is
contestatory. Although such a drama is also present to some extcnt
lt1 tlx.ilic and diasporic films, the hostland location of the
drama makes the ethnlc nurlidentity films different from the other
two categories, whose narratives afc ol'lctlcentered elsewhere.
Some of the keyproblematics of the postcolonial ethnic and
identity cinelna arcencoded in the "politics of the hyphen."
Recognized as a crucial marker of ethnicityand authenticity in a
multicultural America, group terms such as black,
Chicano/a,Oriental, and people of color have gradually been
replaced by hyphenated termssuch as African-American,
Latino-American, and Asian-American. Identity cin-ema's adoption of
the hyphen is seen as a marker of resistance to the homogenizingand
hegemonizing power of theAmerican melting pot ideology. However,
retainingthe hyphen has a number of negative connotations, too. The
hyphen may imply alack, or the idea that hyphenated people are
somehow subordinate to unhyphen-ated people, or that they are
"equal but not quite," or that they will never be totallyaccepted
or trusted as full citizens. In addition, it may suggest a divided
allegiance,which is a painful reminder to certain groups of
American citizens.n The hyphenmay also suggest a divided mind, an
irrevocably split identity, or a type of paraly-sis between two
cultures or nations. Finally, the hyphen can feed into nativist
dis-courses that assume authentic essences that lie outside
ideology and predate, orstand apart from, the nation.
In its nativist adoption, the hyphen provides vertical links
that emphasize de-scent relations, roots, depth, inheritance,
continuity, homogeneity, and stability.These are allegorized in
family sagas and mother-daughter and generational con-flict
narratives of Chinese-American fi.lms such as Wayne Wang's Eat a
Bowl of Tea(1989) and The Joy Luck Club (1993). The fllmmakers'
task in this modality, in StuartHall's words, is "to discover,
excavate, bring to light and express through
cinematicrepresentation" that inherited collective cultural
identity, that "one true self" (1994,393). In its contestatory
adoption, the hyphen can operate horizontally, highlightingconsent
relations, disruption, heterogeneity, slippage, and mediation, as
in TrinhT. Minh-ha's Surnqme Viet Giuen Name Nam (1985) and
Srinivas Krishna's Masala(1990). In this modality, filmmakers do
not recover an existing past or impose animaginary and often
fetishized coherence on their fragmented experiences and
his-tories. Rather, by emphasizing discontinuity and specificity,
they demonstrate thatthey are in the process of becoming, that they
are "subject to the continuous 'play'of history, culture and power"
(Hall 1994, 394). Christine Choy and Rene Tajima'saward-winning
fllm Who Killed Vincent Chin? (l9BB) is really a treatise on
tlre
-
t'-'-'-*
problematic of the hyphen in the Asian-American 0ot'tl()x l, os
it centers on tho lnur-der of a Chinese-American by out-of-work
white Detroit arrtoworkers who, resentfulof ]apanese car imports,
mistook him for being Iapanesc,
Read as a sign of hybridized, multiple, or constructed
iclentity, the hyphen canbecome liberating because it can be
performed and signified upon. Each hyphen isin reality a nested
hyphen, consisting of a number of other intersecting and
overlap-ping hyphens that provide inter- and intraethnic and
national links. This fragmen-tation and multiplication can work
against essentialism, nationalism, and dyadism.Faced with too many
options and meanings, however, some have suggested remov-ing the
hyphen, while others have proposed replacing it with a plus sign.s
Martinscorsese's ITALIANAMERICAN (1974) cleverly removes the hyphen
and the spaceand instead joins the "Italian" with the 'Arnerican"
to suggest a fused third term.The film title by this most ethnic of
New Hollywood cinema directors posits thatthere is no Italianness
that precedes or stands apart from Americanness. I haveretained the
hyphen, since this is the most popular form of writing these
compoundethnic designations.
The compound terms that bracket the hyphen also present
problems, for atthe same time that each term produces symbolic
alliance among disparate mem-bers of a group, it tends to elide
their diversity and specificity. 'Asian-American,,,for example,
encompasses people from such culturally and nationally diverseroots
as the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Iapan, Thailand,
China,Laos, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, and
pakistan. To calibratethe term, such unwieldy terms as "southeast
Asian diasporas" have also beencreated. similar processes and
politics of naming have been tried for the ',black,,British
fllmmakers.
Independent film distributors, such as Third world Newsreel,
Icarus-First RunFilms, and women Make Movies, exploit the hyphen
and the politics of the iden-tity cinema by classifying these films
themarically or by their hyphenated desig-nation. Such
classifications create targets of opportunity for those interested
insuch films, but they also narrow the marketing and critical
discourses about thesefllms by encouraging audiences to read them
in terms of their ethnic content andidentity politics more than
their authorial vision and stylistic innovations. Sev-eral
postcolonial ethnic and identity fllmmakers are discussed
individually andcollectively.
Diaspora, exile, and ethnicity are not steady states; rather,
they are fluid pro-cesses that under certain circumstances may
transform into one another and be-yond. There is also no direct and
predetermined progression from exile to ethnicity,although dominant
ideological and economic apparatuses tend to favor an
assimi-lationist trajectory-from exile to diaspora to ethnic to
citizen to consumer.
t...I
The Stylistic ApproachHow films are conceived and received has a
lot to do with how they are frameddiscursively. sometimes the fllms
of great transplanted directors, such as AlfredHitchcock, Luis
Bufluel, and Jean-Luc Godard, are framed within the
"international,'
waEE urtrlr[. I -.
cincma category.(r Most often, they are classified within either
the ntttlttual t'lttttlttgroI their host countries or the
established film genres and styles. l['hus, I ltc flltttn nf lt,W.
Murnau, Douglas Sirk, George Cukor, Vincent Minnelli, and lrritz
l,ttttg are ttrttally considered as exemplars of the American
cinema, the classical l-lollyworttl rtyla,rlr the melodrama and
noir genres. Of course, the works of these a nd ttl ltnr rf
h'lished directors are also discussed under the rubric of
"auteurisrn." Altorllatlvnly,rnany independent exiled filmmakers
who make films about exile ancl thtllr h$fftH.lands' cultures and
politics (such as Abid Med Hondo, Michel Khleili, Mlra Nntt,and
Ghasem Ebrahimian) or those minority filmmakers who make filrnn
nhtttlltheir ethnic communities (Rea Tajiri, Charles Burnett,
Christine Choy, (irrgttfyNava, Haile Gerima, and Julie Dash) are
often marginalized a meroly nailtlttal,Third World, Third Cinema,
identity cinema, or ethnic filmmakers, wlttl lro tllt'able to fully
speak to mainstream audiences. Through funding, l'estivnl
prorlllll-ming, and marketing strategy, these filmmakers are often
encouragccl ltl ttlll{ltgtlin "salvage filmmaking," that is, making
fllms that serve to preserve net rtltl(tvorcultural and ethnic
heritage. Other exilic fllmmakers, such as Jonas Mckos,
MtttttlHatoum, Chantal Akerman, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Isaac Iulien, and
Shirin Ncslrtt, arcplaced within the avant-garde category, while
some, such as Agns Varda and Cl'rrisMarker, are considered
unclassifi able.
Atthough these classiflcatory approaches are important for
framing films tobetter understand them or better market them, they
also serve to overdetermineand limit the films' potential meanings.
Their undesirable consequences are par-ticularly grave for the
accented films because classification approaches are notneutral
structures. They are "ideological constructs" masquerading as
neutralcategories (Altman 1989, 5). By forcing accented films into
one of the establishedcategories, the very cultural and political
foundations that constitute them arebracketed, misread, or effaced
altogether. Such traditional schemas also tend tolock the
filmmakers into discursive ghettos that fail to reflect or account
for theirpersonal evolution and stylistic transformations over
time. Once labeled "ethnic,""ethnographic," or "hyphenated,"
accented filmmakers remain discursively soeven long after they have
moved on. On the other hand, there are those, such asGregory Nava,
Spike Lee, Euzhan Palcy, and Mira Nair, who have made the movewith
varying degrees of success out of ethnic or Third World fllmmaking
and intomainstream cinema by telling their ethnic and national
stories in more recogniz'able narrative forms.
One of the key purposes of this study is to identify and develop
the most ap'propriate theory to account for the complexities,
regularities, and inconsistenciesof the fllms made in exile and
diaspora, as well as for the impact that the liminaland
interstitial location of the fllmmakers has on their work.
Occasionally, such atheory is explicitly embedded in the fllms
themselves, such as in lonas Mekas's k"rs[,Lost, Lost (1949-76),
Fernando Solanas's Tangos: Exile of Gardel (1985), and
PrajnuParasher's Exile and Displacement (1992). More often,
however, the theory mut bodiscovered and defined as the film moves
toward reception, by marketers, revieW'ers, critics, and viewers.
Such a deductive process presents a formidable challengo'It
requires discovering common features among disparate products of
dilfere tttlysituated displaced filmmakers from varied national
origins who are living urrdmaking films in the interstices of
divergent host societies, under unfamiliar, ol'tctt
-
J FAlll lu l\All(Jl\ALA
lrostile, political and cinematic systems. I have opted t-r work
with a stylistic ap-proach, designating it the "accented style."7
Stylistic history is one ofthe "strongestjustifications for film
studies as a distinct academic discipline" (Bordwell 1997, B).But
stylistic study is not much in vogue today. Fear of formalism, lack
of knowledgeof the intricacies of film aesthetics and film
production techniques, the importationof theories into film studies
with little regard for the film's speciflc textual and
spec-tatorial environments-all these can share the blame.
In the narrowest sense, style is the "patterned and significant
use oftechnique"(Bordwell and Thompson 1993, 337). Depending on the
site of the repetition, stylemay refer to a film's style (patterns
of signiflcant techniques in a single fllm), a film-maker's style
(patterns repeated in unique ways in a filmmaker's oeuvre), or a
Sroupstyle (consistent use of technique across the works of several
directors). Although at-tention will be paid here to the authorial
styles of individual filmmakers, the groupstyle is the central
concern ofthis book. In general, the choice ofstyle is governedby
social and artistic movements, regulations governing censorship,
technologicaldevelopments, the reigning mode of production
(cinematic and otherwise), avail-ability of flnancial resources,
and the choices that individual fllmmakers make associal and
cinematic agents. Sometimes group style is formed by fllmmakers
whofollow certain philosophical tendencies and aesthetic concerns,
such as Germanexpressionism and Soviet montage. The accented group
style, however, has existedonly in a limited, latent, and emergent
form, awaiting recognition. Even those whodealwith the accented
fllms usuallyspeak of exile and diaspora as themes inscribedin the
films, not as components of style. In addition, the overwhelming
majorityof the many valuable studies of filmmaking in exile and
diaspora have been nar-rowly focused on the works of either an
individual filmmaker or a regional groupof fllmmakers. There are,
for example, studies (both lengthy and brief) devoted tothe
fllmmakers Ra(rl Ruiz, Fernando Solanas, Valeria Sarmiento, Amos
Gitai, MichelKhleifi, Abid Med Hondo, Chantal Akerman, Jonas Mekas,
Atom Egoyan, and TrinhT. Minh-ha, and there are studies centered on
Chilean exile films, Arab exile cin-ema, beur cinema, Chicano/a
cinema, Iranian exile cinema, and black African, Brit-ish, and
American diasporic cinemas. While these works shed light on the
modusoperandi, stylistic features, politics, and thematic concerns
of specific fllmmakersor of regional or collective diasporic fllms,
none of them adequately addresses thetheoretical problematic of an
exilic and diasporic cinema as a category that cutsacross and is
shared by all or by many of them.B My task here is to theorize this
cin-ema's existence as an accented style that encompasses
characteristics common tothe works of differently situated
fllmmakers involved in varied decentered socialformations and
cinematic practices across the globe-all of whom are presumed
toshare the fact of displacement and deterritorialization. Such a
shared accent mustbe discovered (at least initially) at the fllms'
reception and articulated more by thecritics than by the
filmmakers.
The components of the accented style include the fllm's visual
style; narrativestructure; character and character development;
subject matter, theme, and plot;structures of feeling of exile;
filmmaker's biographical and sociocultural location;and the fllm's
mode of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. I have
de-voted entire chapters to some of these components or their
subsidiary elements, whileI have dealt with others in special
sections or throughout [An Accented Cinema].
NAilLy srruAUng,CcEgntofl Cln6ml I
liarlicr, I tlivitlcd accented cinema into exilic, diasporic,
and postcolorrlll glltrr [,f.ilrns-a div isirn based chiefly on the
varied relationship of the films anrl llrrll rrrrr kers to
existittg or irnagined homeplaces. Now I draw a further stylistic
dlstltrr.lfulr,between featur:e and experimental films. The
accented feature films are gcnor.ullynarrative, fictional,
feature-length, polished, and designed for commercial
distritru-tion and theatrical exhibition. The accented experimental
films, on the other hand,are usually shot on lower-gauge film stock
(16mm and super-B) or on video, making avirtue of their low-tech,
low-velocity, almost homemade quality. In addition, they
areoftennonfictional, varyinlengthfrom afewminutes to severalhours,
andare designedfor nontheatrical distribution and exhibition. The
feature fllms are generally moreexilic than diasporic, and they are
often made by older 6migr6 fllmmakers. on theother hand, the
experimental films and videos are sometimes more diasporic
thanexilic, and are made by a younger generation of filmmakers who
have been bornor bred in diaspora. The experimental films also tend
to inscribe autobiography orbiography more, or more openly, than
the feature fllms.s In them, the filmmakers,own voice-over
narration mediates between film types (documentary, fictional)and
various levels of identity (personal, ethnic, gender, racial,
national). Althoughnarrative hybridity is a characteristic of the
accented cinema, the experimentalfilms are more hybridized than the
feature fllms in their intentional crossing andproblematization of
various borders, such as those between video and fllm, fictionand
nonfiction, narrative and nonnarrative, social and psychic,
autobiographicaland national.ro
Accented StyleIf the classical cinema has generally required
that components of style, such asmise-en-scne, fllming, and
editing, produce a realistic rendition of the world, theexilic
accent must be sought in the manner in which realism is, if not
subverted,at least inflected differently. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has
characterized black texts as"mulatto" or "mulatta," containing a
double voice and a two-toned heritage: "Thesetexts speak in
standard Romance and Germanic languages and literary structures,but
almost always speak with a distinct and resonant accent, an accent
that sig-nifies (upon) the various black vernacular literary
traditions, which are still beingwritten down" (1988, xxiii).
Accented fllms are also mulatta texts. They are createdwith
awareness of the vast histories of the prevailing cinematic modes.
They arealso created in a new mode that is constituted both by the
structures of feelingof the filmmakers themselves as displaced
subjects and by the traditions of exilicand diasporic cultural
productions that preceded them. From the cinematic traditionsthey
acquire one set ofvoices, and from the exilic and diasporic
traditions theyac-quire a second. This double consciousness
constitutes the accented style that notonly signifles upon exile
and other cinemas but also signifies the condition of exileitself.
It signifies upon cinematic traditions by its artisanal and
collective modesof production, which undermine the dominant
production mode, and by narra-tive strategies, which subvert that
mode's realistic treatment of time, space, andcausality. It also
signifies and signifles upon exile by expressing,
allegorizing,commenting upon, and critiquing the conditions of its
own production, and deter-ritorialization. Both of these acts of
signifying and signification are constitutive
-
of the accented style, whose key characteristics alc cllllrrated
upon in the follow-ing. What turns these into attributes of style
is their rcllcr(ccl inscription in a singlefllm, in the entire
oeuvre of individual fllmmakers, or in the works of various
dis-placed filmmakers regardless of their place of origin or
residence. ultimately, thestyle demonstrates their dislocation at
the same time that it serves to locate themas authors.
LANGUAGE, VOICE, ADDRESS
In linguistics, accent refers only to pronunciation, while
dialect refers to gram-mar and vocabulary as well. More
specifically, accent has two chief deflnitions:"The cumulative
auditory effect of those features of pronunciation which
identifywhere a person is from, regionally and socially" and "The
emphasis which makes aparticular word or syllable stand out in a
stream of speech" (Crystal 1991, 2). Whileaccents may be
standardized (for example, as British, Scottish, Indian,
Canadian,Australian, or American accents of English), it is
impossible to speak without anaccent. There are various reasons for
differences in accent. In English, the majorityof accents are
regional. speakers of English as a second language, too, have
accentsthat stem from their regional and first-language
characteristics. Differences in ac-cent often correlate with other
factors as well: social and class origin, religious af-filiation,
educational level, and potitical grouping (Asher 1994, 9). Even
though froma linguistic point of view all accents are equally
important, all accents are not ofequal value socially and
politically. People make use of accents to judge not only thesocial
standing of the speakers but also their personality. Depending on
their ac-cents, some speakers may be considered regional, Iocal
yokel, vulgar, ugly, or comic,whereas others may be thought of as
educated, upper-class, sophisticated, beauti-ful, and proper. As a
result, accent is one of the most intimate and powerful markersof
group identity and solidarity, as well as of individual difference
and personality.The flagship newscasts of mainstream national
television and radio networks havetraditionally been delivered in
the preferred "offlcial" accent, that is, the accent thatis
considered to be standard, neutral, and value-free.
Applied to cinema, the standard, neutral, value-free accent maps
onto thedominant cinema produced by the society's reigning mode of
production. This typ-ifles the classical and the new Hollywood
cinemas, whose fllms are realistic andintended for entertainment
only, and thus free from overt ideology or accent. Bythat
definition, all alternative cinemas are accented, but each is
accented in cer-tain specific ways that distinguish it. The cinema
discussed here derives its accentfrom its artisanal and collective
production modes and from the fitmmakers' andaudiences'
deterritorialized locations. consequently, not all accented films
are ex-ilic and diasporic, but all exilic and diasporic fllms are
accented. If in linguisticsaccent pertains only to pronunciation,
leaving grammar and vocabulary intact, ex-ilic and diasporic accent
permeates the fllm's deep structure: its narrative, visualstyle,
characters, subject matter, theme, and plot. In that sense, the
accented style infilm functions as both accent and dialect in
linguistics. Discussions of accents anddialects are usually
confined to oral literature and to spoken presentations. Littlehas
been written-besides typographical accentuation of words-about what
TaghiModarressi has called "writing with an accent":
NAHLy 5rxualrng /{cc6nI0 LtnemS J :
'fhe new language of any immigrant writer is obviously accented
and, at leastinitially, inarticulate. I consider this "artifact"
language expressive in its ownright. Writing with an accented voice
is organic to the mind of the immigrantwriter. It is not something
one can invent. It is frequently buried beneath per-sonal
inhibitions and doubts. The accented voice is loaded with hidden
mes-sages from our cultural heritage, messages that often reach
beyond the capacityof the ordinary words of any language. . . .
Perhaps it is their [immigrant andexile writers'l personal language
that can build a bridge between what is famil-iar and what is
strange. They may then find it possible to generate new and
re-vealing paradoxes. Here we have our juxtapositions and our
transformations-the graceful and the awkward, the beautiful and the
ugly, sitting side by side ina perpetual metamorphosis of one into
the other. It is like the Hunchback ofNotre Dame trying to be
Prince Charming for strangers. (1992, 9)
At its most rudimentary level, making films with an accent
involves using on-cameraand voice-over characters and actors who
speak with a literal accent in their pro-nunciation. In the
classical Hollywood cinema, the characters' accents were not
areliable indicator of the actors' ethnicity.Il In accented cinema,
however, the char-acters' accents are often ethnically coded, for
in this cinema, more often than not,the actor's ethnicity, the
character's ethnicity, and the ethnicity of the star's
personacoincide. However, in some of these films the coincidence is
problematized, as inthe epistolary films of Chantal Akerman (News
from Home, 1976) and Mona Hatoum(Measures of Distance,19BB). In
each of these works, a filmmaking daughter reads inan accented
English voice-over the letters she has received from her mother.
The au-dience may assume that these are the voices of the mothers
(complete coincidenceamong the three accents), but since neither of
the films declares whose voice weare hearing, the coincidence is
subverted and the spectators must speculate aboutthe true
relationship of the accent to the identity, ethnicity, and
authenticity of thespeaker or else rely on extratextual
information.
One of the greatest deprivations of exile is the gradual
deterioration in andpotential loss of one's original language, for
language serves to shape not only in-dividual identity but also
regional and national identities prior to displacement.Threatened
by this catastrophic loss, many accented fllmmakers doggedly
insiston writing the dialogues in their original language-to the
detriment of the films'wider distribution. However, most accented
fllms are bilingual, even multilingual,multivocal, and
multiaccented, like Egoyan's Calendar (1993), which contains a
se-ries of telephonic monologues in a dozen untranslated languages,
or Raril Ruiz's OnTop of the Whale (1981), whose dialogue is spoken
in more than a half dozen lan-guages, one of them invented by Ruiz
himself. If the dominant cinema is driven bythe hegemony of
synchronous sound and a strict alignment of speaker and
voice,accented films are counterhegemonic insofar as many of them
de-emphasize syn-chronous sound, insist on first-person and other
voice-over narrations deliverodin the accented pronunciation of the
host country's language, create a slippagebetween voice and
speaker, and inscribe everyday nondramatic pauses and
longsilences.
At the same time that accented films emphasize visual fetishes
of homelancland the past (landscape, monuments, photographs,
souvenirs, letters), as wcll
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I l.ltl ,lu I\AilriJNAr l'\
as visual markolr,l ol'tlil'l'orence and belonging (postrlrc,
look, style of dress andbehavior), thcy crprirlly stress the oral,
the vocal, and tho musical-that is, ac-cents, intonaliorrs, vrices,
music, and songs, which also demarcate individualand collectivc
ickrnt ities. These voices may belong to real, empirical persons,
likeMekas's voicc narrating his diary films; or they may be
fictitious voices, as inMarker's LeLter from Siberia (1958) and
Sunless (1982); or they may be accentedvoices whose identity is not
firmly established, as in the aforementioned filmsby Akerman and
Hatoum. Sergei Paradjanov's four feature films are not only
in-tensely visual in their tableau-like mise-en-scne and
presentational filming butalso deeply oral in the way they are
structured like oral narratives that are toldto the camera.
Stressing musical and oral accents redirects our attention from
the hegemonyof the visual and of modernity toward the acousticity
of exile and the comminglingof premodernity and postmodernity in
the films. Polyphony and heteroglossia bothlocalize and locate the
fllms as texts of cultural and temporal difference.
Increasingly, accented films are using the film's frame as a
writing tablet onwhich appear multiple texts in original languages
and in translation in the formof titles, subtitles, intertitles, or
blocks of text. The calligraphic display of thesetexts
de-emphasizes visuality while highlighting the textuality and
translationalissues of intercultural art. Because they are
multilingual, accented films requireextensive titling just to
translate the dialogues. Many of them go beyond that,however, by
experimenting with on-screen typography as a supplementary modeof
narration and expression. Mekas's Lost, Lost, Iosf, Trinh's Surname
Viet GiuenName Nam, and Tajiri's History and Memory (1991)
experiment with multipletypographical presentations of English
texts on the screen linked in complicatedways to the dialogue and
to the voice-overs, which are also accented in their
pro-nunciation. In cases where the on-screen text is written in
"foreign" languages,such as in Suleiman's Homage by Assassination
{1991) and Hatoum's Measures ofDistance, both of which display
Arabic words, the vocal accent is complementedby a calligraphic
accent. The inscription of these visual and vocal accents
trans-forms the act of spectatorship, from just watching to
watching andliterally read-ing the screen.
By incorporating voice-over narration, direct address,
multilinguality, andmultivocality, accented fllms, particularly the
epistolary variety, destabilize theomniscient narrator and
narrative system of the mainstream cinema and journal-ism. Film
letters often contain the characters' direct address (usually in
flrst-personsingular), the indirect discourse of the fllmmaker (as
the teller of the tale), and thefree indirect discourse of the fllm
in which the direct voice contaminates the indi-rect. Egoyan's
Calendarcombines all three of these discourses to create confusion
asto what is happening, who is speaking, who is addressingwhom,
where the diegeticphotographer and his on-screen wife (played by
Egoyan and his real-life wife) leaveoff and where the historical
persons Atom Egoyan and Arsinde Khanjian begin. Theaccented style
is itself an example of free indirect discourse in the sense of
forcingthe dominant cinema to speak in a minoritarian dialect.
t...I
NAHLy 5tluaUng Accanled Ltnema I
Itotu)HR litrtru(:'l's, lloRDER WRITINGlirr'clcr
cmscir.rrrsrress emerges from being situated at the border, where
multipletlctcrminarrts ol'race, class, gender, and membership in
divergent, even antagoni$.lic, l-ristorical and national identities
intersect. As a result, border consciousnes{t,likc exilic
liminality, is theoretically against binarism and duality and for a
thirdoptique, which is multiperspectival and tolerant of ambiguity,
ambivalence, anclchaos.
The globalization of capital, labor, culture, and media is
threatening to makcborders obsolete and national sovereignty
irrelevant. However, physical borders aroreal and extremely
dangerous, particularly for those who have to cross them. In
re-cent years no region in the world has borne deadlier sustained
clashes over physical(and discursive) borders than the Middle East
and the former Yugoslavia. The col-lisions over physical and
literal lands, even over individual houses and their sym-bolic
meanings, are also waged in the accented films. Since their widely
receivedformulation by Anzaldria (1987), borderland consciousness
and theory have beenromanticized, universalized, and co-opted by
ignoring the specific dislocatory andconflictual historical and
territorial grounds that produce them. However, bordersare open,
and infected wounds and the subjectivity they engender cannot be
post-national or post-al, but interstitial. Unequal power relations
and incompatible iden-tities prevent the wound from healing.
Since border subjectivity is cross-cultural and intercultural,
border filmmakingtends to be accented bythe "strategy of
translation rather than representation" (HicksI991, xxiii). Such a
strategy undermines the distinction between autochthonous andalien
cultures in the interest of promoting their interaction and
intertextuality. As aresult, the best of the border fllms are
hybridized and experimental-characterize clby multifocality,
multilinguality, asynchronicity, critical distance, fragmented
or:multiple subjectivity, and transborder amphibolic
characters-characters whomight best be called "shifters." Of these
characteristics, the latter bears discussi:nat this point.
In linguistics, shifters are words, such as "I" and "you," whose
reference canbe understood only in the context of the utterance.
More generally, a shifter is an"operator" in the sense of being
dishonest, evasive, and expedient, or even beinga "mimic," in the
sense that Homi Bhabha formulated, as a producer of critical
ex-cess, irony, and sly civility (1994). In the context of border
filmmaking, shifters arecharacters who exhibit some or all of these
registers of understanding and perfor-mativity. As such, they
occupy a powerful position in the political economy of bothactual
and diegetic border crossings. For example, in Nava's El Norte, a
classic bor-der film, the shifters consist of the following
characters: the pollo (border-crossingbrother and sister, Enrique
and Rosa); the coyote (the Mexican middleman who fora fee brings
the pollo across), the migra (the U.S. immigration offlcers who
chascand arrest Enrique); the pocho (Americans of Mexican descent
who speak MexicarrSpanish imperfectly, the man in the fllm who
turns Enrique in to the immigratiorrauthorities); the chola/cholo
and pachuca/pachuco (young inhabitants of the borelcrunderworld who
have their own dialect called cal); and the U.S.-based Mexicnrror
Hispanic contractors who employ border crossers as day laborers
(among (ltcrtr,Enrique).l'zThe power of these border shifters comes
from their situationist existclt:o,
-
I FAET r.0 NAI lsltlL A
their familiarity with (hc cultural and legal cldes
ol'intoritcting cultures, and theway in which thoy rrrnrripulate
identity and the asyltrrnctrical power situations itrwhich they
find thcrnselves.
Accented filnrs inscribe other amphibolic character typcs who
are split, double,crossed, and hyhriclized and who perform their
identities. As liminal subjects andinterstitial artists, many
accented filmmakers are themselves shifters, with
multipleperspectives and conflicted or performed identities. They
may own no passport orhold multiple passports, and they may be
stranded between legality and illegality.Many are scarred by the
harrowing experiences of their own border crossings. Somemay be
energized, while others may be paralyzed by their fear of
partiality. Theirfilms often draw upon these biographical crossing
experiences.
THEMES
Understandably, journeys, real or imaginary, form a major
thematic thread in theaccented films. Journeys have motivation,
direction, and duration, each of whichimpacts the travel and the
traveler. Three types of journeys are explored in thisbook: outward
journeys of escape, home seeking, and home founding; journeys
ofquest, homelessness, and lostness; and inward, homecoming
journeys. Dependingon their directions, journeys are valued
differently. In the accented cinema, west-ering journeys are
particularly valued, partly because they reflect the filmmakers'own
traiectory and the general flow of value worldwide. The westering
journey isembedded, in its varied manifestations, in Xavier
Koller's Journey of Hope (1990),NizamettinArig'sACry.for
Beko(1992), and GhasemEbrahimian'sThe Suitors (1989).In Nava's El
Norte, a south-north journey lures the Mayan Indians from
Guatemalato the United States.
There are many instances of empowering return journeys: to
Morocco in FaridahBen Lyazid's Door to the Sky (1989), to Africa in
Raquel Gerber's Orl (1989), and toGhana in Haile Gerima's Sankofa
(1993). When neither escape nor return is possible,the desire for
escape and the longing for return become highly cathected to
certainicons of homeland's nature and to certain narratives. These
narratives take the formofvariedjourneys: from the dystopic and
irresolute journey oflostness in Tarkovsky'sStalker (1979) to the
nostalgically celebratory homecoming journey in
Mekas'sReminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971-:72) to the
conflicting return journey toIapan and China inAnn Hui's Songolthe
Exile (i990).
Not all journeys involve physical travel. There also are
metaphoric and philo-sophical journeys of identity and
transformation that involve the films' charactersand sometimes the
filmmakers themselves, as in Mekas's fllms or in Ivens and
Lori-dan's Tale of the Wind.
AUTHORSHIP AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL INSCRIPTION
If prestructuralism considered authors to be outside and prior
to the texts thatuniquely express their personalities, and if
cinestructuralism regarded authors asstructures within their own
texts, poststructuralism views authors as fictions withintheir
texts who reveal themselves only in the act of spectating.
Post-structuralisttheory of authorship is thus embedded in theories
of ideology and subject formation,
NAFTCY Sttuating Accented Clnema I I
utttl it priviltlgos tiJ)cctatorial reading over that of
authoring. Roland Barthes wentst I'itr as to clcclaro that "the
birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death ofl lrc
Author" ( 1977, l4B). In this figuration, the author as a
biographical person ex.r:rcising parentage over the text
disappears, leaving behind desiring spectators inscarch of an
author. This author whom they construct is neither a projection
noril representation of a real author but a flctive figure within
the text (Barthes 1925,27). According to this formulation, the
flctional structure or subject ,Atom Egoyan,,whom the spectators
discover in the films of Atom Egoyan is not the same as, andcloes
not necessarily map out onto, the empirical person named Atom
Egoyan.Since texts create subject positions for both authors and
spectators, poststructuraltheory must deal with the construction of
both authors and spectators. specta-tors, however, like authors,
are not only subjects of texts but also-Barthes to
thecontrary-subjects in history, negotiating for positions within
psychosocial forma-tions, producing multiple readings and multiple
author and spectator effects. Theclassical Hollywood cinema's
invisible style creates filmic realism by promotingthe impression
of cohesiveness of time, space, and causality. As a result,
diegetiireality appears to be authorless, natural, and mimetic, in
an organic relationshipto the profilmic world. As John caughie
notes, "The removal or suppression of theclear marks of 'authored
discourse' transforms ideology from something producedout of a
locatable, historical, determined position into something natural
to theworld" (1981,202).
My project is precisely to put the locatedness and the
historicity of the authorsback into authorship. To that extent,
accented cinema theory is an extension of theauthorship theory, and
it runs counter to much of the postmodern theory that at-tempts to
either deny authorship altogether or multiply the authoring
parentageto the point of "de-originating the utterance."r3 However,
fllm authors are not au-tonomous, transcendental beings who are
graced by unique, primordial, and origi-nary sparks of genius.
Accented film authors are literally and flguratively
everydyjourneymen and journeywomen who are driven off or set free
from their places oforigin, by force or by choice, on agonizing
quests that require diplacements andemplacements so profound,
personal, and transformative as to shape not only theauthors
themselves and their fllms but also the question of authorship. Any
diicus-sion of authorship in exile needs to take into consideration
not only the individual-ity, originality, and personality of unique
individuals as expressive film authors butalso, and more important,
their (dis)location as interstitial subjects within
socialformations and cinematic practices.
Accented fllms are personal and unique, like flngerprints,
because they are bothauthorial and autobiographical. Exile
discourse needs to counter the move by somepostmodern critics to
separate the author of the fllm from the enunciating subjectin the
film, for exile and authorship are fundamentally intertwined with
historicalmovements of empirical subjects across boundaries of
nations- not just texts.
To be sure, there are postmodern accented filmmakers, such as
Egoyan and cavehZahedi,inwhose films the relationship of the
authoringfllmmakerto both the text andthe authoring structure
within the text is one not of direct parentage but of
convolntcclperformance. However, the questioning of the bond
linking autobiography to autlrrlr.ship should not be used as a
postmodernist sleight of hand to dismiss the specilicltyof exilic
conditions or to defuse their subversive and empowering
potentiaiity, Sucil
-
t'--'--
a move comes at the very moment that, lbr the cllasllollz,rrd
subalterns of the world,history, historical agency, and
autobiographical cousciuusncss have become signifi-cant and
signifying components of identity, artistic prldrrction, and social
agency.Accented authors are empirical subjects who exist outside
and prior to their films.
In the accented cinema, the author is in the text in multiple
ways, traversing thespectrum of authorship theories, from
prestructuralism to poststructuralism. In alongitudinal and
intertextual study of the films of individual fllmmakers, we
maydiscover certain consistencies from which we can construct an
authorial presencewithin the films. It is thus that authors become
discursive figures (Foucault 1977)who inhabit and are constructed
not only by history but also by their own filmictexts. How they
inhabit their fllms, or, in Bordwell's term (1989, 151-68), how
they are"personifled" varies: they may inhabit them as real
empirical persons, enunciatingsubjects, structured absences,
flctive structures, or a combination of these. In theaccented
films, determining the mode of habitation of the author within the
text is acomplex task, even in films in which the fllmmakers appear
as empirical persons andas themselves either audiovisually (Mekas's
fllms, including losf, Lost, Lost), or onlyvisually (Suleiman's
Chronicle of Disappearance), or only vocally and as the film's
ad-dressee (Akerman's NewsfromHome),or asflctionalcharacters
(Egoyan's Calendar),or as author surrogates (Naderi's Manhattan by
Numbers and Shahid Saless's -Rosesfor Africa, 1991). In all these
cases, filmmakers are engaged in the performance ofthe self. In
short, because of their interstitiality, even in situations of
self-inscriptionexilic authors tend to create ambiguity regarding
their own real, fictive, or discursiveidentities, thus
problematizing Phillipe Lejeune's "autobiographical pact,"
whichrequires that the author, the narrator, and the protagonist be
identical (1989, 5).
Exilic authorship is also a function of the fllmmakers' mode of
production. Infact, in their multiple incarnations or
personiflcations, the authors are producedby their production mode.
If the cinema's dominant postindustrial productionmodes privilege
certain kinds of authorship, then the artisanal accented
produc-tion modes must favor certain other authorial signatures and
accents. It is worthbearing in mind that such signatures or accents
signify both the various incarna-tions oftheir authors and the
conditions ofexile and diaspora. The interpretation ofthese
signatures and accents depends on the spectators, who are
themselves oftensituated astride cultures and within collective
formations. Hence, the figures theycut in their spectating of the
accented filmmakers as authors are nuanced by theirown extratextual
tensions of difference and identity.
t...I
CLOSE-UP: ATOM EGOYAN,S ACCENTED STYLE
Like all approaches to cinema, the accented style attempts to
reduce and to channelthe free play of meanings. But this approach
is driven by its sensitivity to the pro-duction and consumption of
films and videos in conditions of exilic liminality anddiasporic
transnationality. The style designation also allows us to
reclassify fllmsor to classify certain hitherto unclassifiable
fllms. Thus, Mekas's Lost, Lost, Lost,which has been variously
regarded as documentary, avant-garde, or diary film, willyield new
insights if reread as an accented film. If one thinks of Bufluel as
an exilicfilmmaker, as does Marsha Kinder (1993), further
understanding about his films,
rrrrL I JtLuaLtnE EcFnTgo Ltnemt I
lritlrclto rrrrirvailable, will be produced. Likewise, a
rereading of Migr-rel Littfn,sdocudrarrra 'l'he Jackal of
Nahueltoro (El chacal de Nahueltoro, 1969), turns it intoa
protoexilic film containing many components of the accented style
in emergenlform, even though at first blush the story does not
warrant such an interpretatiotr,
The accented style helps us to discover commonalities among
exilic filmmakurtthat cut across gender, race, nationality, and
ethnicity, as well as across bounrlttries of national cinemas,
genres, and authorship. References to filmmakers rango lhrandwide,
from Godard to Mekas, fromAkerman to Med IIonclo, anl from Solanurr
loTrinh. Approached stylistically, fllms can be read, reread, ancl
hack-read not only unindividual texts but also as sites of struggle
over meanings and idcntities. lly pr6[.Iematizing the traditional
schemas and representational prarcliccs, this aplliourtlrblurs the
distinction, often artificially maintained, among various lilrrr
typur* *rrr:lras documentary, fictional, and avant-garde. All of
these typeri aro r:ontltkrrotl ltort',
The accented style is not a fully recognized and sanctioned
filrrr gnrt 1r, 6ltl llrrrexilic and diasporic filmmakers do not
always make accented films. In l'1rll, rlgrt gl'themwouldwish to be
in Egoyan's place, to move out of marginal cinerla rrit:lrus
intgthe world of art cinema or even popular cinema. Style permits
the critics (o tlack t[eevolution of the work of not only a single
fllmmaker but also a group of filmmakers.As I discuss in [An
Accented cinema'sl chapters on mode of production, Asian pa-ciflc
American filmmaking has gradually evolved away from an ethnic focus
towarcldiasporic and exilic concerns, while Iranian exilic
fllmmakers have evolved towarda diasporic sensibility. These
evolutions signal the transformation of both filmmak-ers and their
audiences. They also signal the appropriation of the fllmmakers,
theiraudiences, and certain features of the accented style by the
mainstream cinemaand byits independent offspring. Because it goes
beyond connoisseurship to situatethe cindastes within their
changing social formations, cultural locations, and cin-ematic
practices, the accented style is not hermetic, homogeneous, or
autonomous.It meanders and evolves. It is an inalienable element of
the social material process ofexile and diaspora and of the exilic
and diasporic mode of production.
NOTES1. I thank BiII Nichols for suggesting the parallel between
exile and taboo. Also, see exile as
"aesthetic gain" in Kaplan 1996, 33-41.2. lhave incorporated
these and other attributes ofexile and alterity to formulate
a"para-
digm ofexile" (Naficy 1993a).3.
IfRushdieisanexampleofexilichybridity,F.M.Esfandiaryisanexampleofexilicvirtuality.
In the 1960s, Esfandiarywrote novels from exile about the horror
of life in his homeland Iran(The Identity Cardll966D, but in the
late 1980s he changed his name to FM-2030 and devel-oped the
concept of transhumanism, which dismissed all usual markers of
continuity andidentity. To be a transhuman is to be a universal
"evolutionary being" (FM-2030 f 9Bg, Z0S).
4. This is particularly true for the fapanese-Americans whose
loyalty to the United Stateswas questioned during World War II and
to the Muslim Americans whose loyalty is oftenquestioned in
contemporary times.
5. Peter Feng suggests removing the hyphen from
'Asian-American," while Gustavo p. Fir-mat recommends replacing it
with a plus sign for "cuban + American" (1994, 16). someinsert a
forward slash between the two terms. On the politics of the hyphen,
especially forAsian-Americans, see Feng 1995, 1996; Lowe 1g91.
-
6. Although',international,,,even,,transnational,,, thcsc
tllnrr.tors_whom Douglas (iornery(1991) labels "the individual as
internatiorrul filn, urtisti,l -,,',..,,
"ri'.-icrered,,exilic,,or"diasporic,, by the deflnition used
here.7' In an earlier pubricllt:::^, explored the promise of
trrcorizing rhese films as a transna_tional "genre" (Naficy
I9969).B' on regional exilic film.making, the following are notabre
studies: on Latin-American exilefilmmakers, see pick (1993, G7_85)
u"J er:rro., (1986); on Chilean exile films, see King(1990); on
cuban exile.films, see Lopez (ts96j; on cinemas of the black
diasporu, see Martin(1995) and Ukadike (1994); on btack Sritlsh
ina"p"rra",r, nh";J" N;;;;er (1994a), Diawara(1993b), and Fusco
(1988); on brack Americardiaspora nr-., ,u" oiuwara (rg93a) andReid
(1991); on postcolonial and multicultl diaspric fiim., ."" it
"t ", "nd stam (1994)and sherzer (r996); on women and African
and Asin dia.p;;;;r-;, .;e r,oster (r997); onCaribbean exilic
fllms, see Cham (rsgz); o;Asiarr_a.,,"ri.urr--f-r,,s""" L"o.rg
(1991); onchicano/a cinemas, see Fregoso (1993i and Noriega
(19;;;;;;"iliddle Eastern exilefilms' see Friedlander (1995J nd
Nn./ri"r, o. yiddirh nr-r,."" Horerman (lgg1a);on Iranian exile
films, see Naficy trgga); on Turkish erilu nri ,e" Naficy (1996g);
onsoviet and Eastern European fllmmakers ir, ,rru w".,, ."" p"tri r
o*y". (1990); onexile and 6migr6 cinema, particularly in France and
Europe, in.irJi.r!
"r,"rrsive fllmog-raphies, see the followingipecial issues ol
ilnemactionmagazine:no. 7, ,.cin6ma contreracisme" (n.d.); no. e,
,,!ing1as. de I,6migration,, (summer 1979); no. 24, ,,Cin6mas
deI'6migration" (n.d.); no. 56, "cin6mas m6tis: De Hollywood
ur;i;;i"rrs,, (Iury 1990).
?;"r;:::;i#L?;)r;,1.r^_"k",,, .o,,,,rt th" index or th"
il;;_;il;ctions throughout
9. On experimental diaspora cinema, see Marks 1994.10. Even
these two types of accented films are not fixed, for the works of
some flrmmakersmay fall only partially into one or share attrilutes
of both. this is another way in whichthese fllms are hybrid. For
example, sotarrust zrgo s: Exile of Gartleland Krishna ,s Masalamay
be categorized as hybrid fiims in their crossing of the bounJari".
uro the mixing ofelements of musical.and-merodrama, ,.ug"y ,"a
iomedy, ,urruiir" urra nonnarrative,fictional and nonfictionar,
realism u"a."iir*, p.rrori
""J"riir. However, bothsolanas and Krishna make feature-rength
fllms, have high ,ilil;;,;;d have large mar_kets in mind. A kev
difference u"t*"""it * is trrat wnil,ua;;;;;p" rafirm,
Tangosremains exilic' for it isJo^cused solely on exile and on a
binary relationship with the home-land' Likewise' Mekas's
films.ttur. *" it"hl characteri"i.. "ir"i-r,
rlature firms (rheirlength) and experimenral fllms ttheir
aestheiicsl.ll' In the classical Hollvwood cinema. the stars who
retained rheir,,foreign,,accents fareddifferentry. some courd nor
ser parrs;;.*;;;i;;;i;;;;;;;..;r,::,s"Jnainuuiun .tr,r,particularly
Grera Garbo, sonji Henie, and Ingrid Bergmn, *"." ,*,y cast as
Euro-pean and soviet foreign characters. some British-born
stars,,such as cary Grant, acquireda "transatlantic accent,"
::^1uT:d p".trup.-ru.u.rse it was both readily comprehensibleand
hard to place (Iarvie 1991, 93).12' other middlemen figures in the
border drama include sanctuary movement advocateswho assist
potential refugees to gain a.ytumlntrr" united states.13. I have
borrowed this phrase from pfeil l9BB, 387.
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llrrrclwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 7993. Film Art: An
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lltrrton, Julianne, ed. 1986. Cinema and Social Change in Latin
America: Conuersations withFilmmakers. Austin: University of Texas
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Oaughie, Iohn, ed. 1981. Theories ofAuthorship: AReader. London:
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Oohen, Robin. 1997. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London:
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Diawara, Manthia. 1993. Black American Cinema. New York:
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Foucault, Michel.1977. Language, Memory, Practice. Ed. D. F.
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Fusco, Coco. 1988. Young British and Black: A Monograph on the
Work of Sankofa Film/VideoCollectiue and Black Audio Film
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Gates, Henry Louis, Ir. L9BB. The Signifuing Monkey: A Theory of
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Gilroy, Paul. 1993. TheBlackAtlantic: Modernity
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1991. " There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack": The Cultural
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I9BB. "Nothing But Sweat inside My Hand: Diaspora Aesthetics and
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Gomery, Douglas. 1991. Mouie History: A Suruey. Belmont, Calif.;
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Hall, Stuart. 1988. "NewEthnicities." ICADocuments,no.7:27-3L
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Harlow Barbara. 1991. "Sites of Struggle: Immigration,
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Hicks, D. Emily. 1991. Border Writing: The Multidimensional
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Jarvie, Ian C. 1991. "Stars and Ethnicity: Hollywood and the
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Kaplan, Caren. 1996. Questions of Trauel: Postmodern Discourses
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King, Iohn. 1990. "Chilean Cinema in Revolution and Exile." It
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Lejeune, Phillipe. 1989. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul Eakin.
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DUDLEY ANDREW
An Atlas of World Cinema
n expert in French cinema and culture and a keystone figure in
film studies in the Unltot
5ttes, Dudley Andrew (b.rS+S) trained many of the country's
influential theorists durlnl
ltis long tenure at the University of lowa. Since zooo, Andrew
has been R. Selden RoSt
l,rofessor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale
University. His books The Major Flln
Iheories(rgZ6) and Concepts in Film Theory (rg8+) synthesized
continental film theory fo
Lnglish-speaking readers, and his 1978 study of Andr6 Bazin
retains definitive status. Hr
is also well known for his work on adaptation, aesthetics, and
world cinema, with severa
books on French cinema and works on Japanese, lrish, and West
African film'
While film festivals and university curricula still foreground
national cinemas anr
auteurs, an understanding of the compllcated ecology of world
cinema can link filr
practices and help displace the notion of Hollywood as the
center of image culture' At
juncture when Korean horror clnema attracts fan sites all over
the world and lranian au
teurs rank alongside the ltalian neorealists and Japan's postwar
masterS' a more cosmC
politan approach is required. Andrew's own expertise in the
cinema of France, a forme
colonial power and an important source of film financing in
francophone Africa, inform
his study of the latter region's film production. lf we must
increasingly think of nationi
cinema in transnational terms, what concepts of world cinema are
most relevant?
ln "An Atlas of World Cinema," originally published in zoo4,
Andrew interrogate
longstanding "connoisseur" approaches to "foreign film" fostered
by the elite postw
film festivals and "survey" models of course design. He
recommends putting these ap
proaches alongside a number of different models, invoking the
analogy of an atlas thi
allows different features to come forward depending on the
"mapplng" criteria. For el
ample, "demographic" maps show that a nation's cinema culture is
defined as much b
film reception-what people watch, which may be domestic films,
Hollywood blockbus
ers, or something else-as it is by the country's production.
"Topographical" maps sho'
the "depth" or cultural rootedness of certain film practices as
well as the formations thi
cross national boundaries. Andrew's erudite and conceptually
supple essay matches tfexciting changes in the twenty-first-century
globalization of cinema with an equally cha
lenging advance in the responsibility of film studies.
READING CUES & KEY CONCEPTS
i&{11l How does Andrew position commercial Hollywood
production in his "atlas of wor
cinema"? Does the term "world cinema" apply to Hollywood?
ffil Look at a contemporary film festival program. How would the
"political" map of wor
cinema look according to its programming?
ffIillli Andrew writes that "every film implies a geopolitical
orientation." Think of a film th
illuminates his argument.