ABSTRACT

De-Westernizing Film Studies aims to consider what form a challenge to the enduring vision of film as a medium - and film studies as a discipline - modelled on ‘Western’ ideologies, theoretical and historical frameworks, critical perspectives as well as institutional and artistic practices, might take today. The book combines a range of scholarly writing with critical reflection from filmmakers, artists & industry professionals, comprising experience and knowledge from a wide range of geographical areas, film cultures and (trans-)national perspectives. In their own ways, the contributors to this volume problematize a binary mode of thinking that continues to promote an idea of ‘the West and the rest’ in relation to questions of production, distribution, reception and representation within an artistic medium (cinema) that, as part of contemporary moving image culture, is more globalized and diversified than at any time in its history. In so doing, De-Westernizing Film Studies complicates and/or re-thinks how local, national and regional film cultures ‘connect’ globally, seeking polycentric, multi-directional, non-essentialized alternatives to Eurocentric theoretical and historical perspectives found in film as both an artistic medium and an academic field of study.

The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics.

Contributors: Nathan Abrams, John Akomfrah, Saër Maty Bâ, Mohammed Bakrim, Olivier Barlet, Yifen Beus, Farida Benlyazid, Kuljit Bhamra, William Brown, Campbell, Jonnie Clementi-Smith, Shahab Esfandiary, Coco Fusco, Patti Gaal-Holmes, Edward George, Will Higbee, Katharina Lindner, Daniel Lindvall, Teddy E. Mattera, Sheila Petty, Anna Piva, Deborah Shaw, Rod Stoneman, Kate E. Taylor-Jones

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

De-Westernizing film studies

part I|63 pages

(Dis-)Continuities of the cinematic imaginary

chapter 1|15 pages

Imag(in)ing the universe

Cosmos, otherness, and cinema

chapter 2|19 pages

Questioning discourses of diaspora

“Black” cinema as symptom

chapter 3|14 pages

Affective passions

The dancing female body and colonial rupture in Zouzou (1934) and Karmen Geï (2001)

part II|58 pages

Narrating the (trans)nation, region, and community from non-Western perspectives

chapter 5|18 pages

De-Westernizing national cinema

Reimagined communities in the films of Férid Boughedir

chapter 6|12 pages

Banal transnationalism

On Mohsen Makhmalbaf's “borderless” filmmaking

chapter 7|14 pages

Griots and talanoa speak

Storytelling as theoretical frames in African and Pacific Island cinemas

chapter 8|12 pages

The intra-East cinema

The reframing of an “East Asian film sphere”

part III|39 pages

New (dis-)continuities from “within” the West

chapter 9|11 pages

“A double set of glasses”

Stanley Kubrick and the midrashic mode of interpretation

chapter 10|14 pages

Situated bodies, cinematic orientations

Film and (queer) phenomenology

chapter 11|12 pages

Has film ever been Western?

Continuity and the question of building a “common” cinema

part IV|96 pages

Interviews

chapter 12|12 pages

“There is no entirely non-Western place left”

De-Westernizing the moving image, an interview with Coco Fusco

chapter 13|7 pages

De-Westernizing film through experimental practice

An interview with Patti Gaal-Holmes

chapter 14|3 pages

“With our own pen and paper”

An interview with Teddy E. Mattera

chapter 15|6 pages

“To colonize a subject matter is to learn nothing from it”

An interview with Jonnie Clementi-Smith

chapter 16|13 pages

“Isn't it strange that ‘world' means everything outside the West?”

An interview with Rod Stoneman

chapter 17|3 pages

Beyond stereotypes and preconceptions

An interview with Farida Benlyazid 1

chapter 18|7 pages

“About structure, not about individual instances”

An interview with Daniel Lindvall

chapter 19|3 pages

“Still waiting for a reciprocal de-Westernization”

An interview with Mohammed Bakrim 1

chapter 20|5 pages

“Moving away from a sense of cultures as pure spaces”

An interview with Deborah Shaw

chapter 21|4 pages

Nu Third Queer Cinema

An interview with Campbell X

chapter 22|8 pages

“To start with a blank slate of free choices”

An interview with Kuljit Bhamra

chapter 23|5 pages

“The crazy dream of living without the Other”

An interview with Olivier Barlet 1

chapter 24|18 pages

“De-Westernizing as double move”

An interview with John Akomfrah