film
Dear Sarah, I’m in the foothills of holiday territory as I write this, so forgive (or at least understand) this opening bout of sentimentality. However, there’s a formal point here, if not a critical one, so I take some comfort in the fact that this is periphrasis with a purpose.
As I watched Marie Menken’s short film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945)—screened as part of an exhibit at the Noguchi Museum earlier this year—I found myself thinking about Gertrude Stein. Specifically, I recalled the letter Stein wrote to Samuel Steward in 1940, thanking him for a gift he had sent her and Alice B. Toklas: a countertop stand mixer known as the Sunbeam Mix Master 500.
Though the term cinephilia simply means “love of cinema,” historically it has been used to mark a love of cinema with a difference.
The success of his film Calcutta 71 (1972), remarked director Mrinal Sen, was not due to “cinematic excellence,” but “more because of the time in which it was made and released.”[1] Sen was right. Calcutta 71 did not reap profits in the box office. In this it was much like the two other films that were part of Sen’s Calcutta trilogy, Interview (1971) and Padatik [The guerilla fighter] (1973).
Coming of age in the 1960s in newly independent Senegal, documentarist Samba Félix Ndiaye participated in a ciné-club at the French Cultural Center in Dakar with a group of friends that included fellow future filmmakers Ben Diogaye Beye, Mahama Traoré, and Djibril Diop Mambety.
Early in Samuel Shimon’s first-person autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris (‘Irāqī fī Bāris), the young author-narrator has left his hometown of Habbaniya, Iraq on the eve of Saddam Hussein’s military takeover of the country. A child pushcart vendor now in his early twenties, Shmuel harbors a rags-to-riches dream of traveling to the US and making it big as a Hollywood director. While he hails from a poor Assyrian Christian family, he is detained and tortured in Damascus, due in part to his Jewish name, on suspicion of being a Zionist spy.
Cinephilia is generally known as the feverish love of cinema.[1] In Hong Kong during the 1960s, such affection towards cinema was entangled with the complex sensation and sentiments revolving around Chinese nationalism (“Cultural China”), the British colonial rule and locality during the contesting ideologies in the Cultural Cold War and demonstrated in wide ranging practices.
Hong Kong has enjoyed a long film history, which dates back to as early as the invention of film. Recent scholarship has begun to pay attention to the early screen culture of Hong Kong cinema. These findings paved the way for exploring the cinephilic culture in Hong Kong that has taken shape since the mid-1920s, when local critics and movie lovers began to group themselves to form cine clubs and unions and published film magazines. Yinguang (銀光) was
In the late 1940s, two highly significant cineclubs were founded in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, building on the work of Cine Arte del SODRE, an initiative of the state-run broadcaster and cultural agency Servicio Oficial de Radiodifusión Eléctrica, which sought to create a public space for the diffusion of alternative cinema beginning in 1944. Cine Club del Uruguay and Cine Universitario were preeminent institutions in Latin America, both for their large membership and for the consistency of their programming and other activities.
Arriving in Havana in 1948, eighteen-year-old Néstor Almendros (1930–1992), who would go on to become one of the most renowned cinematographers of the twentieth century, found that “Cuba was a privileged place to see films.”[1] Not only did he find a large range of moviegoing options with hundreds of movie theaters showing films from different nationalities in their original language, but he also encountered a burgeoning cinephile community.