Post-Coloniality: Projection of Ghana In Video-Films

The rise of the mainstream video industry has been significant towards socio-cultural and economic development in Ghana; however, this study will not focus on the impacts of the video industry of Ghana. This article primarily examines the image construction of Ghana in video-films. Over the past few years, videofilms in Post-colonial Ghana have often been critiqued by film scholars and critics for reinforcing superstitious beliefs and instigating backward tendencies that derail national development. Normative scholarships have critically explored the visuality of Ghanaian video-films and their themes. Nonetheless, these normative scholarships have often overlooked the nexus between the Ghanaian society and video texts. It is against this scholarly gap that this study engages the meta-question of how video-films project Ghana in their texts. This article will engage a critical textual reading of a few popular films from the Pentecostal and Occult genres to contextualize the ideological sub-texts and the image construction of Ghana in these selected video-films. I argue that major ‘postmodern’ thematic concerns in Ghanaian video-films considerably denigrate and malign Ghana’s image, as well as neglect issues of national interests.

Yilmaz Güney’s The Fields of Yuréghir and Arkadaş: From Despair to Hope

This article discusses two relatively unknown works of Yilmaz Güney in the English-speaking world: Boynu Bükük Öldüler (They Bowed their Heads in Shame),1 a semi-autobiographical novel, which in 1972 won the Orhan Kémel prize, and Arkadaş (The Friend), a film released in Turkey by Güney Film in 1974. More than ten years separate these two works. The Fields of Yuréghir was written during Güney’s imprisonment from 1960 to 1963, a period marked by the military coup of 27 May 1960, which lasted until 1961 and a series of coalition governments from 1961 to 1965 under the premiership of İsmet İnönü (1884-1973) of the Republican Party. Arkadaş was filmed in 1974 against the backdrop of the Turkish invasion of Northern Cyprus in August 1974, a time of great patriotic fervour under the charismatic and left-leaning premiership of Bülent Ecevit (1925-2006). Güney had by then experienced considerable success as a filmmaker and actor. Arkadaş is a product of this favourable constellation of circumstances, both political and personal, that marked this brief period that was abruptly ended by his imprisonment in September 1974. The article is divided into the following sections: a short biography of Yilmaz Güney; a summary of The Fields of Yuréghir and Arkadaş; a thematic analysis of the two works under the headings of political engagement, sexual mores, religion, and national identity; and a conclusion.

Coming of Age in the Diaspora: Bollywood and the Representation of Second Generation British Indian Diaspora

Bollywood films are a unique visual repository of India’s public imaginings, and they can, therefore, serve as guides to how India sees its past, present, and aspirational future (Dwyer, 2010). Through close intertextual readings of three key popular films depicting British Indian youth, this article explores the ways in which the UK-born/raised second-generation Indian diaspora has come to be represented within Bollywood. We argue that inter-generational negotiations around long-distance nationalism, social reproduction, and marriage are pivotal to the articulation and regulation of diasporic youth subjectivities in Bollywood films. By foregrounding the interplay of gender, sexuality, and nation, our analysis illuminates the role of Bollywood in mediating a transnational Indian identity which is tethered simultaneously to economic neoliberalism and social conservatism.

Mapping Yeşilçam: A relational approach to the Turkish film industry

Turkey’s Yeşilçam film industry produced more than 5500 films during its lifetime of 40 years. The industry had a unique narrative approach shaped around its economic model, Turkey’s ambivalent connection with modernization and the country’s domestic culture. Yet, particular characteristic qualities of the industry remained rather limited up until the last decade, in which vast databases were built up as a consequence of the digital turn. In this study, we develop a relational approach and conduct network analysis to the Yeşilçam with the aim to better understand the patterns of its constitution. Our findings suggest that Yeşilçam was not a homogenous industry as often considered by the film scholarship, rather divided into two main clusters in which professional, narrative and financial dynamics were significantly different.

Changes in Women’s Representations in Turkish Cinema from the 1980s to the Early 1990s

This article focuses on the representations of women alongside the social and historical background of Turkish cinema from the 1980s through the early 1990s. In the following section, I articulate the political events in the 1980s - the early1990s and its impacts on Turkish society and cinema. I delve into the modernist representations of women in the 1980s cinema to analyze women’s gender codes (based on social/cultural and cinematic codes). Finally, in the last section, I examine Atıf Yılmaz’s cinematic images of women in his films and analyze two of his films A Sip of Love (1984) and The Night, Angel and Our Gang (1994) in terms of gender codes.

Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation: Baise Moi and Hard-Core Pornography

Based on a framework developed by the works of critical theorists Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, this article focuses on a reconceptualization of the relationship between representation on screen and the production of sexualities in order to examine the discourse around the film Baise Moi (Despentes and Trinh Thi, 2000). There have been criticisms about the film’s pornographic and violent elements as well as its “bad ending”, arguing that the film results in a reaffirmation of the patriarchal power practices. This article counterargues that such readings remain within the limited territory of seeking an ideal representation of femininity based on the gender/sex binary which Butler’s work has critiqued. The final section of the article aims to demonstrate how Baise Moi conveys a layered audio-visual organization that focuses on the attainability of different sexualities that are not conforming to the idea of universal sexuality through adopting a pornographic aesthetic that provides the means through which the film can overturn gender norms as well as hard-core porn’s idealism.

Rocky Balboa: The Innocent and the Invincible Hero of Low Income Class

This study is aiming to scrutinize that how American low income class is represented in Rocky Balboa film series in regards of Rocky Balboa character. It will try to understand the mission which is given to Rocky along the film series by examining the concepts such as the values which Rocky represents, class standing, moving up in social ladder, etc. in the scripts of Rocky movies. The life line of Balboa which we have begun to witness while he was living in a poor neighborhood leads us to the different faces of his life along the six films of series: firstly, the world championship that he got by defeating Apollo Creed, then keeping his belt for a long time and defeating Ivan Drago, then losing all his wealth and has to return to the neighborhood where he was living previously and the last fight that he did during his retirement. The hypothesis of the study is that the films of Balboa series are reflecting the life of American low income class ‘realistic’ with Rocky Balboa’s character, and the hypothesis is going to want to verify it along the study.

Real, Reel and the Anthropocene: Eco-trauma Testimonies in the Film Valiya Chirakulla Pakshikal

The paper attempts to read the Endosulfan disaster in Kerala as an instance of the Anthropocene wherein the unscientific use of a pesticide resulted in the persistent misery of a population and the ecology in which they struggle to survive. The suffering is further presented to a larger audience through the film Valiya Chirakulla Pakshikal (2015, Dir. Dr Biju) by assimilating the reel and the real to bear testimony to their struggles amidst the toxicity of the chemical. The film, as the paper argues, becomes a representative text in the eco-trauma genre that on the one hand displays the disaster while on the other offers a cultural resistance against the unchecked use of chemicals around us. The film situates the Endosulfan disaster amongst the global movements against the pesticides and emphasises the need of a healthy environment.

Locating the Storyteller in Silent Waters: Sabiha Sumar’s Cinematic Tale of Shared Histories and Divided Identities

In her multi award-winning feature film Silent Waters (2003), Pakistani woman filmmaker Sabiha Sumar connects the socio-political traumas of the Partition of India and creation of Pakistan (1947) with the onset of military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization period (1977-1988) in Pakistan. Presenting a story based on real-life events, the film focuses on the impact of religious fundamentalism and nationalism on women in particular. Examining Silent Waters as an example of “history on film/film on history” (Rosenstone 2013), and film as an “agent, product, and source of history” (Ferro 1983), the discussion identifies and analyzes the filmmaker’s own tacitly embedded location and participation in the filmic narrative as an experiential ‘auto/bio-historiographer’, arguing for the value of this new paradigm in Cinema Studies.

Reading the Simultaneous Motion and Reality Bending Concepts through Doctor Strange

In order to exemplify the interaction between architecture and science fiction films, Doctor Strange (2016), one of today's cinema examples, was chosen because of that the special effects created in computer environment by transferring the dreams to the film have a surrealist effect on the film; of the fantastic spaces that arise with the deformation of real places become the main character of the film; of foreseeing a different future in terms of architecture. Within the scope of the study, the film was read through the changes of time and space of the concepts of “reality bending” and “simultaneous motion”. As a result of the readings on these concepts, the relationship of cinema with architecture has gained a different dimension, and it has been seen that this film can create a fantastic perspective and inspiration to the designers about the future deconstructivist buildings.