Journal articles on the topic 'Activist cinema'

From September 2017 to June 2020 the University of the Balearic Islands organised a monthly film workshop called Aules Sense Armaris: Cinema LGBTIQ+ a la UIB focused on giving visibility to affective and sexual diversity through film analysis in a university context. Each film was introduced with an interview with a queer activist or cultural expert related to the particular topics the film addressed, and after the screening a cinematographic and critical discussion was held in which the students contributed either with their own reflections or asking questions to the guests. This article exposes the necessity of approaching and celebrating sexual diversity from the university classroom as a form of activism. It also describes the as well as describing the criteria that were followed when choosing the films, how the monthly workshops took place and the most interesting conclusions from the post-film debates between activists, university students and spectators.

Hooligan Sparrow breaks with many taboos in Chinese cinema. It is the first internationally acclaimed documentary by a Chinese female director to centre upon investigating the activities of Ye Haiyan, a Chinese sex and women’s rights activist, as well as to address the politically sensitive topic of sexual assault in China. This is the first study to examine the cinematic contributions of Wang Nanfu and Ye Haiyan’s activism and feminist writings posted on Ye’s online social media accounts on Sina Weibo and Twitter. I unpack the power dynamics in this documentary as well as the interplay between the filmmaker’s subjectivity and the female rights activist’s subjectivity. This study also investigates how masculine aesthetic representations of sexual assault in Chinese cinema have blurred the issue of consent and shows how the subjectivities of female directors like Wang Nanfu and Vivian Qu bring more impactful representations of sexual violence in Chinese cinema.

Mostly known as one of the leading actresses in 1960s-1970s French cinema, Delphine Seyrig was also a media and a feminist activist working collaboratively within the framework of the women’s liberation movement. This article proposes to tackle Seyrig’s involvement in feminist video production the 1970s and explores the continuum she inhabited, from the auteur cinema in which she was actress and muse, to the disobedient practices in which she was video maker, actress and activist. Seyrig’s meditation on her work as an actress, as well as on the patriarchal structures sustaining the film industry, strongly resonates with recent debates prompted by the #metoo movement.

James Baldwin was a vocal critic of Hollywood, but he was also a cinephile, and his critique of film was not so much of the medium itself, but of the uses to which it was put. Baldwin saw in film the chance to transform both politics and art—if only film could be transformed itself. This essay blends readings of archival materials, literature, film, and print culture to examine three distinct modes in Baldwin’s ongoing quest to revolutionize film. First, I argue, literature served as a key site to practice being a filmmaker, as Baldwin adapted cinematic grammars in his fiction and frequently penned scenes of filmgoing in which he could, in effect, direct his own movies. Secondly, I show that starting in the 1960s, Baldwin took a more direct route to making movies, as he composed screenplays, formed several production companies, and attempted to work in both Hollywood and the independent film scene in Europe. Finally, I explore how Baldwin sought to change cinema as a performer himself, in particular during his collaboration on Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley’s documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982). This little-known film follows Baldwin as he revisits key sites from the civil rights movement and reconnects with activist friends as he endeavors to construct a revisionist history of race in America and to develop a media practice capable of honoring Black communities.

The article addresses some of the challenges and possibilities of taking slowness as a tool to theorize and practice a way of being an activist anthropologist in the contemporary (neoliberal) university. The activism discussed here intervenes in the university itself. To articulate slowing down as mode of resistance to the unbearably fast and exclusionary rhythms of academic life, the article puts into dialogue documentary cinema and critiques of contemporary academia. Turning to the film Inland Sea as an instance of a mode of attention/attending to the world otherwise, the article concludes on the political potential of slowness to become a collective strategy of resistance to the increased culture of quantification, competition, and financialization in the university, and a tactic for an engaged anthropology to come.

The formation of a Peoples' Assembly and occupation of the city of Oaxaca (Mexico) in 2006 has been widely considered a rebirth of the Commune and was also one of the first widely video-recorded uprisings of the 21st century. As media practice, activist videos approximate an identity of creative art/work and socio-political change but also warrant consideration of their formal aspects. How do stylistic choices help or hinder reflecting on the not-quite-here-yet of prefigurative politics? In contrast with video art, graffiti, and performance protest, activist videos overwhelmingly adhere to evidentiary forms. Carefully edited, they invite viewers to view crowdsourced footage as indexical traces of what “really” occurred in front of the lens but draw little attention to contingency or to the artifice of cinema. Activist videos' politics of truth and reliance on interviews underscore lingering, more hierarchical visions of revolution and risk inscribing what is there to the detriment of equality and potentiality. Even so, some activist videos playfully invoke a future already arrived.

Abstract This article discusses several documentary films since the 2010s that portray the place and the landscape related to Korea's social reality or a personal or collective memory of its past, classifying their common trope as the “audiovisual turn.” The trope refers to the uses of the poetic and aesthetic techniques to highlight the visual and auditory qualities of the images that mediate the landscape or the place. This article argues that the films’ experiments with these techniques mark formal and epistemological breaks with the expository and participatory modes of the traditional Korean activist documentary, as they create an array of Deleuzian time-images in which a social place or natural landscape is reconfigured as the cinematic space liberated from a linear time and layered with the imbrication of the present and the past. The images, however, are read as updating the activist documentary's commitment to politics and history, as they renew the viewer's sensory and affective awareness of the place and the landscape and thereby render them ruins.

The advocacy for gayism and lesbianism in Nigeria is informed by transnational cultural processes, transculturalism, interculturalism, multiculturalism and globalisation. Although critical dimensions on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) are becoming recurrent subjects in Nigerian scholarship, scholarly works on LGBT, sexual identity and Nigerian cinema remain scarce. Perhaps, this is because of indigenous Nigerian cultural processes. While Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian novelist cum socio-political activist, campaigns against marginalisation and subjugation of gays and lesbians and for their integration into the Nigerian cultural system, numerous African socio-cultural and political activists hold a view that is dialectical to Adichie’s. The position of the members of the anti-gay group was further strengthened with the institution of stringent laws against gay practice in Nigeria by the President Goodluck Jonathan led government in 2014. In recent times, the gay, bisexual, transgender and lesbian cultures have been a source of raw material for filmmakers. Some of the thematic preoccupations of films have bordered on questions such as: what does it mean to be gay? Why are gays marginalised? Are gays socially constructed? What is the future of the advocacy for gay and lesbian liberation in Nigeria? Although most Nigerian film narratives are destructive critiques of the gay culture, the purpose of this research is not to cast aspersion on the moral dimension of LGBT. Rather, I argue that films on LGBT create spaces and maps for a critical exploration of the gay question. While the paper investigates the politics of gay culture in Nigerian cinema, I also posit that gays and lesbians are socio-culturally rather than biologically constructed. This research adopts literary and content analysis methods to engage Moses Ebere’s Men in Love with reference to other home videos on the gay and lesbian motifs.

O universo das artes cênicas pode ser um lócus privilegiado de observação da presença da variável raça e gênero na sociedade brasileira? A análise, em perspectiva histórica, da trajetória de uma atriz negra de teatro, cinema e televisão, pode iluminar a presença do racismo e do antirracismo na História do Brasil? Essas e outras perguntas podem ser respondidas quando visitamos a trajetória da atriz de teatro, cinema e televisão e ativista do movimento social negro, a partir das narrativas contidas nas entrevistas e periódicos, sobre os primeiros anos de atuação de Léa Lucas Garcia, na década de 1950. Léa Garcia atuou em sete montagens do Teatro Experimental do Negro dirigida por Abdias Nascimento, no Rio de Janeiro e em São Paulo, entre 1952 e 1957. O ano de 1956 marca o início do seu trabalho como atriz profissional no teatro, ao participar da montagem de Orfeu da Conceição, de Vinícius de Moraes. Orfeu do Carnaval (1957), dirigido por Marcel Camus, foi a sua estreia no cinema, graças a sua interpretação nesta obra, foi agraciada com o segundo lugar na premiação de melhor atriz no Festival de Cinema de Cannes.Palavras chave: Léa Garcia; Relações raciais; Orfeu do CarnavalAbstractCan the universe of performing arts be a privileged locus for observing the presence of the variable race and gender in Brazilian society? Can the analysis, in historical perspective, of the trajectory of a black actress in theater, cinema and television, illuminate the presence of racism and anti-racism in the History of Brazil? These and other questions can be answered when we visit the trajectory of the actress of theater, cinema and television and activist of the black social movement, from the narratives contained in the interviews and periodicals, about the first years of Léa Lucas Garcia’s performance, in the decade of 1950. Léa Garcia performed in seven plays at the Teatro Experimental do Negro directed by Abdias Nascimento, in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, between 1952 and 1957. The year 1956 marks the beginning of her work as a professional actress in the theater, by participating editing by Orfeu da Conceição, by Vinícius de Moraes. Orpheus of Carnival (1957), directed by Marcel Camus, was his debut in cinem;a, thanks to his interpretation in this work, he was awarded the second place in the award for best actress at the Cannes Film Festival.Keywords: Léa Garcia; Race relations; Orfeu do Carnaval

Abstract This article argues that contemporary post-Yugoslav cinema contributes to a better understanding of the deeply divided societies in the aftermath the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001), in terms of stimulating empathy for the Other, and, more specifically, raising awareness of the loss of human lives, thus memorializing and commemorating these experiences. It also explores how film directors deal with social issues, including war crimes, and how they appear as activist citizens while their governments struggle to take relevant action. The research aims to bridge the gap between the more theoretical literature that focuses on the role of the media in dealing with the past and more practical analysis providing examples from contemporary post-Yugoslav cinema, and to illuminate the link between film, peace-building and active citizenship. Finally, the article stresses how the idea of post-war reconciliation may be communicated through films and pertains to the notion that a positive film effect exists.

Porn is so safe; everything is inscribed in a master plan. Like a drug designed to consume entertainment and to be back to work in time, pornography allows you to be at ease in the corner of your world. Through masturbatory micro-rituals, it reaffirms all Western societies values. Back when Pluto was a planet, pushed by the advent of digital technology, a lightning ripped through the grey sky of this boredom valley. In the historical period between the nineties and the two-thousands, pushed by the possibilities of digital communication, a new body front emerged as theoretical and activist battleground, deconstructing the dogmatic anti-sexwork positions of historical feminism and LGBT-identities. “Porn Studies” came out as an open, multidisciplinary field, mixing Queer Theory, Gender Studies, Media Studies, Cinema History and Performance Art. One of the main goals stands in the use of pornography as text, in which to read and to deconstruct identity boundaries where either heteronormative or LGBT-gentrifying politics produce a flat market space. The application of D.I.Y.-ethics to “Porn Studies” moved the thought to a political and activist level through the practices of self- representation and cultural individualization.

Always keen on the spectators’ freedom of interpretation, André Bazin’s film theory not only asks the famous question “What is cinema?,” but it also explores what is a human. By underlining the importance of personalist ethics, Angela Dalle Vacche is the first film specialist to identify Bazin’s “anti-anthropocentric” ambition of the cinema in favor of a more compassionate society. Influenced by the personalist philosophy of his mentor, Emmanuel Mounier, Bazin argued that the cinema is a mind-machine that interrogates its audiences on how humankind can engage in an egalitarian fashion towards other humans. According to Bazin, cinema’s ethical interrogation places human spirituality or empathy on top of creativity and logic. Notwithstanding Bazin’s emphasis on ethics, his film theory is rich with metaphors from art and science. The French film critic’s metaphorical writing lyrically frames encounters between literary texts and filmmaking styles, while it illuminates the analogy between the élan vital of biology and cinema’s lifelike ontology. A brilliant analyst of many kinds of films from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, ranging from fiction to documentary, from animation to the avant-garde, Bazin felt that the abstractions of editing were as important as the camera’s fluidity of motion. Furthermore, he disliked films based on a thesis or on an a priori stance that would rule out the risks and surprises of life in motion. Neither a mystic nor an animist, Bazin was a dissident Catholic and a cultural activist without membership of a specific political party. Eager to dialogue with all kinds of communities, Bazin always disliked institutionalized religions based on dogmas.

The documentary genre is a subjective and vindictive cinema that has been used for activist practices since its creation, broadening viewpoints, breaking taboos and showing different, rich and plural realities. The documentaries Yes we fuck!, Jo també vull sexe! and Crip Camp have in common the visibility of the political potential of bodies in rebellion. In this article, we will present a state of the art on the relationship between sexuality and functional diversity. We will then carry out an audiovisual analysis, with a qualitative and interdisciplinary approach, of the selected documentaries, placing special emphasis on the social transgressions that mean openly showing sexualities and diverse bodies. Among the main results, it is worth highlighting the way in which the documentary genre increases the degree of personal and collective empowerment and ends up becoming a weapon of political vindication.

This article considers the value of the leftist filmmaking collective Ogawa Productions’ interdisciplinary practice, which combined filmmaking and farming as an activist project of advocacy for social and environmental justice in 1980s Japan. It argues that Ogawa Pro, as the collective was known, integrated agriculture and film culture to construct a radically inclusive ecosystemic understanding of humans, plants, animals and the climate. Viewed today, their approach exemplifies an early model of ecological thinking that speaks to the recent multispecies turn in the arts, humanities and social sciences. But Ogawa Pro’s turn to the land is also riddled with ambivalence: the films harbour agrarian romanticism bordering on a politics of nostalgia and ethnic environmentalism. Torn between what we might today call progressive and reactionary traditionalist politics, Ogawa Pro’s enmeshed filming and farming practices constitute an important example of what I call Land Cinema ‐ that is, film entangled in territorial, ecological and aesthetic aspects of land. Though the collective’s earlier and more militant films have received critical acclaim in recent years, its later land-based work merits further attention for the way it exposes political tensions over how to cultivate, represent and share space responsibly.

In its origins, surrealism transpired as a radical subversive culture within advanced capitalist societies in Europe during the first few decades of the twentieth century. In colonial and postcolonial societies, however, surrealism variously assumed a quintessence of a protracted struggle between, on the one hand, the old and neocolonial cultural hegemony and, on the other hand, the subversive resistance by the neocolonized, with all the paradoxical elements that are part and parcel of that struggle. One of the few manifestations of a surrealism-inspired cinematic work in the Arab world during the last century is Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria, Again and Forever (1990). This critically acclaimed film is a rich example of Arab cinema that celebrates non-normative personal identity while simultaneously rethinking traditional notions of nation under colonial rule. This third installment of Chahine’s autobiographical film quartet, which he intermittently drew over the course of his thirty-year career, indulges a complex exposé of Chahine the man, the artist, and the political activist. It also draws on mostly imagined, and partly real, episodes in the filmmaker’s life. As such, and rather than using a typically grand anticolonial metanarrative, the film favors the depiction of multiple surrealist proliferations of difference, juxtapositions, dislocation, and distortions seen not as embodiments of a single truth but rather as energized political and aesthetic forms of a collective project for revamping Egyptian and Arab identity and reality.

Else Vieira é professora de Estudos Brasileiros e Latino-Americanos e coordenadora do setor de Português na Universidade de Londres, onde criou um Bacharelado de Língua Portuguesa e Estudos Lusófonos. Atua, principalmente, com os seguintes temas: estudos comparados de literatura e cinema, cinema latino-americano e lusófono e tradução. O artigo estudado, Growing Agency: The Labors of Political Translation, é parte do livro Translation, Resistance, Activism, editado por Maria Tymoczko, em 2010.

The notion of independent cinema has generated conversations and controversies around the world as scholars have attempted to demarcate what kinds of productions fit – or do not – into the category. In the absence of major private film companies, independent cinema in Cuba includes those films made without or with minimal support from the state-run Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). Since its foundation in 1959, ICAIC has been the main and only programmer of all films screened in theatres across the country. This article offers a brief account of the relationship between Cuban independent cinema and mainstream institutions in the last few years. As a starting point, I will consider the decision to exclude the film Santa y Andrés/Santa & Andres (Lechuga 2016) from the programme of the 38th Havana Film Festival and the debates that ensued. I will also discuss the recent cultural policies – a decree that recognizes the legal rights of independent film and audio-visual producers and the introduction of 3G data plans for citizens – that hope to spawn new forms of filmmaking in Cuba and the role of social media as a collective platform for cultural conversations in the public sphere.

This paper aims to present a Knowledge Network on Transcultural Communication, a work in progress organized in Archives, Knowledge Bases and Virtual Museums. One of its substantive parts, the Knowledge Node Transcultural Cinema, gathers knowledge and sources (Film Studies texts, photos, videos, etc.) about critical cinema and resistance cinema. This node articulates theories and postcolonial concepts to analysis/interpretations based on examples of film images and videos that include postcolonial representations. The “clash of civilizations” is a core idea underlying the debate on dissent and / or consensus among cultures and about postcolonialism. The dissimilarity between colonial / postcolonial societies and cultures, often takes the form of a “conflict of meanings.” And the discursive resistance against colonialism is often based on mobilizing hybridizations. Contemporary cultures are essentially “hybrid cultures”. Such hybrid nature is present in many images and sounds of resistance cinema, and it is urgent to emphasize its characteristics, for example central dichotomies transmitted by authors of this cinema genre: “colonizer / colonized,” “identity / difference,” “power / no power”. Resistance film audiences can see and criticize, in a participatory way, the worldviews and discourses shared by cinema imagination / activism in cinema, contributing to a common, global and critical culture / knowledge.

The consignment of industrial wage labor and its central figures to the status of ruins has become something of a cliché in contemporary scholarship and artistic practice. On this view, its demise first became apparent in the 1970s, the precise moment when Brazilian labor movements experienced their first significant gains. This article identifies, describes, and analyzes the emergence of a cinema-labor cycle in São Paulo (1977–82) that constitutes a key instance of Brazil’s “deferred 1968”: a complex response to the distinct pressures of a repressive military regime, entrenched paternalistic union structures, and the auteurist legacy in cinema. In their efforts to apprehend the largest strikes in recent history, filmmakers in the cinema-labor cycle attempted what had seemed elusive in Brazilian cinema up until this point: a mutually constituting alliance between cinema and labor. This article focuses above all on the new understandings of time—including urgency, immediacy, the present tense, and the belated—forged in these films, and the new relationships that emerged among artists and worker-activists as a result. Ultimately, an analysis of this film cycle queries attempts to inscribe both cinema and labor in the past tense.

In the 1950s, in Lisbon, several students coming from different Portuguese colonies in Africa met at “CEI - Casa dos Estudantes do Império” - a cultural and leisure centre for college students and other scholars from Africa or Asia. I would highlight names such as Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973), Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928-1990) and Agostinho Neto (1922-1979), famous activists that, at the time, invested in cultural forms of resistance against colonialism, being literature a means to raise political awareness among students. The high-profile women writers in this millieu were Noémia de Sousa (1926-2002), Alda Lara (1930-1962) and Alda do Espírito Santo (1926-2010). My research will assess the role of these three women in the cultural front of a collective political awakening, which later led to the independence struggles of the Portuguese colonies. These three women were also the first canonised women writers in their own national literary systems, thus being founding figures in a women’s genealogy of literary achievement. However, their works also the represent a particular generation, framed by the atmosphere lived at CEI. As a consequence of the political activism developed by the CEI millieu, some of the involved young scholars had to leave Portugal going into exile in Paris, where they gathered around the magazine Présence Africaine. This paper also explores CEI’s “Paris connection”, via Mário Pinto de Andrade and his wife, the film director Sarah Maldoror (1938-), who eventually adapted Luandino Vieira’s texts to cinema (Monangambé, 1968 and Sambizanga, 1972). At the time, Maldoror’s work was conceived as a means to promote international awareness of the regime Angolan people were fighting against. The final aim of the research is to explore the articulation among the works by these four women in relation to CEI’s activism.

Cinema censorship is a relatively unexplored topic in the discipline of surveillance studies. While movies are frequent references throughout the scholarship, such citations tend to be limited to plot and imagery and overlook the ways in which the medium can be subject to state intervention or other forms of censorship and self-censorship. This essay uses the case of the 2015 Hong Kong independent film Ten Years to explore how cinema deserves to be considered alongside other media and communications whose vulnerability to institutional control and monitoring are already widely documented by surveillance studies. The film, which reflects Hong Kong residents’ critique of mounting Chinese power, was the object of an aggressive vilification and repression campaign by the mainland Chinese government. It also spawned a grassroots defense in which audiences and filmmakers mobilized around the film as a symbol and site of civic discourse and political critique. Using the concepts of participatory media and online activism and connecting Ten Years with Hong Kong’s 2014 “Umbrella” protests against Chinese rule, this essay shows how cinema invites the same interventions and interactivity as social media and other digital or communications technologies. Indeed, because Ten Years’ history of populist activism resembles well-known instances of media mobilization such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter, this essay demonstrates not only cinema’s multiple dimensions of relevance for surveillance studies but also uncovers new global spaces whose film history will diversify surveillance studies.

This article examines various circulations of Hollywood productions in Iran and the ways in which audiences, critics, cultural administrators, and activists relate to them. I am particularly concerned with what I call “Hollywood cosmopolitanisms,” forms of receptivity to religious and cultural others as mediated by the U.S. film industry. Rather than dividing attitudes toward Hollywood in terms of openness and refusal, or cosmopolitanism and counter-cosmopolitanism, I suggest that we attend to different modes of openness: those that are overtly acknowledged, those that are concealed, and those that pass altogether unrecognized but make their mark in the form of “occult resonance.”

This essay examines the work of British “cinefeminist” Claire Johnston, whose activism, writings, and filmmaking during the 1970s and 1980s merged innovative feminist media production practices with new modes of theoretical inquiry. Johnston's 1973 essay “Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema” was crucial to feminist film theory's development, yet the essay's canonization has reduced her thinking to a handful of theoretical concerns. To grasp the full political promise of Johnston's work, this article reconsiders the essay in three related contexts, examining: the historical circumstances in which it was published and the feminist debates it participated in; its ties to Johnston's less noted writings; and its relation to Johnston's filmmaking while she was a member of the London Women's Film Group, a feminist filmmaking collective committed to building coalitions among women media workers. This article won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Writing Prize in 2016.

Throughout the twentieth-century American history, the circulation of African arts in the New York City runs parallel with African American activism. The African on-screen presence in Harlem needs to be examined in this broader context in order to better grasp the historical trajectory of its development in the neighbourhood and also the encounters and exchanges between Africans and African Americans. Today, the increased interest in African screen media productions result from the confluence of two phenomena: the current Black renaissance and the reconfigurations of African cinema under the influence of migration. Harlem is once again playing a pivotal role in the dissemination of African culture, specifically African cinema in the New York City.

It is a need to tell, to share the experience. A human being is an entity that tells stories and also needs stories. Myths and tales have explained the world to human beings when rational mind was not used and science was not developed yet. Myths are the first teachers of humanity, and tales have continued to form new narratives with new tools in the later ages. By the 20th century, humanity meets with a new storytelling tool. Apart from narrative films, cinema, although there are genres such as educational films, documentaries or news films, primarily undertook the mission of 'storytelling' and attracted the attention of the masses by telling stories. The paradoxical relationships and distance presented by the contemporary world to humanity are presented to the audience through sounds and images, and the audience tries to make sense of the existence of its environment and itself in a critical framework. Director and cinema question themselves in contemporary cinema narratives. The greatest innovation brought by contemporary cinema is hidden in the feature that leads the narrative to questioning activism. In the study, Derviş Zaim's, one of the most important directors of modern Turkish cinema, film Waiting for Heaven, was used as an example. The film was evaluated under the titles of technical structure, light, sound, time and space, actor, movement and performance, decor, costume and make-up in order to gain a qualitative understanding of the work. Keywords: Cinema, Movie Criticism, Derviş Zaim, Waiting For Heaven

Abstract Using developments in poetry, music, and cinema as case studies, this article examines the relationship between left-wing politics and cultural production during the long 1960s in Turkey. Intellectual and artistic pursuits flourished alongside trade unionism, student activism, peasant organizing, guerrilla movements. This article explores the convergences between militants and artists, arguing for the centrality of culture in the social movements of the period. It focuses on three revealing debates: between the modernist İkinci Yeni poets and young socialist poets, between left-wing protest rockers and supporters of folk music, and between proponents of radical art film and those of cinematic “social realism”.

Amongst film audiences in Thailand, there is a group that follows the new releases enthusiastically. They watch many films in the course of a week and do not only focus on films in the cinema but also search for places to watch alternative movies. Forming in the 1970s, these people are now known as “Thai Cinephiles”. They started off as regular audiences at screening events before becoming film critics, programmers and curators. This practice significantly expands the awareness of alternative cinema in Bangkok and other parts of Thailand. This paper traces the activities of Thai cinephiles from the late of 1970s when they first met each other at cultural institutions that screened alternative cinema, to the 1990s when conversations evolved around video shops and film festivals at shopping malls. The age of digital also saw Thai cinephiles took into writing, promoting and creating diverse content across various platforms from blogs, message boards to Facebook. Their practice/activism across different generations shared through interviews reveals the principle of sharing the good stuff they found and building new generation of directors and audiences. This historiography provides an alternative history on Thai film culture that bridges existing writings on the Thai new waves and limited research in the Thai language on audience motivations and cinema going.

Réflexions sur la représentation du handicap retrouvée dans le cinéma québécois est un court- métrage documentaire s’articulant autour de deux questions principales : comment aborder la représentation du handicap telle qu’elle se retrouve dans certains films québécois ; et, dans quelle mesure l’étude critique de cette représentation permet-elle de concevoir le cinéma comme un régime de la représentation (Hall 1997a) québécois articulé autour de certaines normativités (Butler, 2004)? Pour y parvenir, la réalisatrice a entretenu une discussion avec des réalisateurs, réalisatrices, actrices et activistes au sujet de la lutte de pouvoir autour de la représentation (Hall, 1997a; du Gay et al., 1997); celle-ci s’inscrivant dans une lutte plus large concernant des rapports de force dans la société québécoise. Cette discussion prend pour étude de cas le film Prends-moi (2014), court-métrage de fiction réalisé par André Turpin et Anaïs Barbeau- Lavalettte, deux personnes non-handicapées. Le documentaire met de l’avant une analyse critique des représentations capacitiste, explorant l’autoreprésentation comme une réappropriation de l’espace culturel et social de la représentation des personnes handicapées dans le contexte québécois. Réflexions sur la représentation du handicap retrouvée dans le cinéma québécois is a short documentary exploring two core questions: First, how can we approach the portrayal of disability in certain Québec films? And second, how can a critical study of disability facilitate a conceptualization of Québec cinema as part of a « regime of representation » (Hall, 1997) articulated around certain norms (Butler, 2004)? To do so, the director opens up a discussion with film directors, producers, actors and activists concerning the power struggles over representation (Hall, 1997; du Gay et al., 1997) and the broader power relations in Québec society of which they are a part. This discussion focuses on the Quebec film Prends-Moi (2014) directed by non-disabled filmmakers André Turpin and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette. The short documentary offers an exploration of cultural representations of disability in Quebec media that allows for a deeper analysis of Quebec’s ableist cultural conceptions as well as a space for self- representation, which can be understood as a form of re-appropriation of media space.

Abstract The uprisings that swept across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 brought to world attention the revolutionary potential of youth in the face of social injustice and political repression. This article explores how the so-called Arab Spring foregrounded Moroccan youth's alternative conceptions of citizenship and being young in the MENA region today. Using the emergence of citizen cinema as a case study, I will examine the subjective politics of Moroccan youth's alternative to dominant political and social authority. Made, self-produced and distributed online free of charge by a young and self-avowed citizen filmmaker, Nadir Bouhmouch's debut documentary My Makhzen and Me (2012) does not pretend to offer an objective account of Morocco's so-called Arab Spring. Instead, the filmmaker focuses on relating his own personal story as a young upper-class Moroccan student in San Diego, who returned to the country in the summer of 2011 armed with a camera as his weapon in the February 20 Movement's battle for democratic citizenship and social justice in Morocco. In this article, I will show how the subjective point of view structuring this documentary offers a unique perspective not only on Morocco's Arab Spring but also on the impossibility of representing citizenship objectively on the documentary camera. The article ultimately argues that because the personal is always already political in North African documentary filmmaking since 2011, the subjective point of view allows for the emergence of the insurgent citizenship of the region's youth.

In 1939, at the height of her stardom, the actress Shanta Apte went on a spectacular hunger strike in protest against her employers at Prabhat Studios in Poona, India. The following year, Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the extractive nature of the film industry. In Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I Join the Movies?, 1940), she highlighted the durational depletion of the human body that is specific to acting work. This article interrogates these two unprecedented cultural events—a strike and a book—opening them up toward a history of embodiment as production experience. It embeds Apte's emphasis on exhaustion within contemporaneous debates on female stardom, industrial fatigue, and the status of cinema as work. Reading Apte's remarkable activism as theory from the South helps us rethink the meanings of embodiment, labor, materiality, inequality, resistance, and human-object relations in cinema.

Ever since antiquities, theatre has been a medium of provoking sentimental reaction and an entertainment of the populace especially the elite. Authors of this genre do present active noble characters in their works making as if it is real. We do learn in Greco-Roman Empire how amphitheatre hosted Caesars, their officials and empiric subjects watching the gladiators and the persecuted Christians in the medieval era. Fifty years of cinema and the television as well as the new media have changed the mind-set of the global community towards life in general to form a unique interconnected universal cultural chains. In this research, we would like to use political activism theories called pluralist theories of Norris Pippa as critical lens to analyse the trend of political activism in the modern theatre of the early 21st century in comparison to that of the 20th century which led to violent revolutionary movements.

While the proliferation of digital technology has expanded the capacity to document human rights violations and publicize them via cell phone, cloud, and social networks, raw footage of state-sponsored violence is often the subject of competing interpretations that multiply through their viral circulation. Accordingly, much recent attention has been placed on the evidentiary uncertainty that attends digital documents coming out of Syria. This article offers an alternative framework through which to think about the efficacy of images that circulate outside of state institutions and corporate media outlets. Focusing on works by Rabih Mroué, Ossama Mohammed, and the filmmaking collective Abounaddara, this article examines how the videos produced during the Syrian uprisings and war give rise to a critical reflection on cinematic truth and the medium's long-standing correlation with violence and death. The affective force of images that operate at the threshold of visibility unsettles the terms of both human rights practice and documentary filmmaking.

The uprisings categorized as the “Arab Spring” were not spontaneous events. To make them seem so is to marginalize the lineage of activism that brought them into being. Within cinema, this decades-long struggle has been invigorated by militant manifesto writing, collective film production, and the development of viewing communities dedicated to Third World liberation, often infrastructurally supported by now vanquished nationalized post- and anticolonial institutions. Barra fi al-Shari‘/Out on the Street (Jamina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, 2015) catalyzes many of these revolutionary histories. Drawing on archival and shared footage dedicated to fighting for workers’ rights, the film’s communally conceived plot pivots around a factory takeover. The narrative is carried by contributors whom the filmmakers call “en-actors.” These en-actors both restage the violence exerted upon them by managers and the police and exemplify how cinema can become a form of training–for those on screen and in the audience–for future revolutionary action.

During summer 2018, Club Des Femmes (CDF), in collaboration with the Independent Cinema Office funded by the British Film Institute (BFI), curated a UK-wide touring season of films considering the aftermath of May 1968. ‘Revolt, She Said: Women and Film after ’68’ comprised nine feature films and eight accompanying shorts, exploring the legacy of 1968 on contemporary feminisms, art and activism transnationally. In this article, two members of CDF unpack the queer feminist ethics and affects of the tour, through the voices of multiple participants, and framed conceptually by Sara Ahmed’s ‘willful feminist’ and Donna Haraway’s ‘staying with the trouble’.

This paper examines the cinematographic reworking of memory spaces associated with power relations and structural injustice. The way in which space is represented and used as a medium that reflects power relations allows to question the space itself in cultural productions from Central-Eastern Europe when associated with Romani people (space and power relations, memory of slavery and discrimination, space and freedom, territoriality, space and its inhabitants, non-belonging, segregation, etc.). The paper focuses on motion pictures produced in the last decade in Romania, a prolific period due to the increasing interest for memory activism and to the multiplication of the cultural exploration of challenging topics. It aims to identify narrative, visual, and aesthetic expressions used as deterritorialization practices to stimulate relational remembrance and engagement with ongoing social inequality and structural injustice. Two short films – Alina Șerban’ s Bilet de iertare (Letter of forgiveness) and Adrian Silișteanu’s Scris/Nescris (Written/Unwritten) – and a western type film – Radu Jude’s Aferim!, winner of the Silver Bear for Best director at Berlinale in 2015, are analysed here.

The paper traces connections of the works by Eurasian and Russian avant-garde directors Dzigа Vertov and Vsevolod Pudovkin. With this purpose it addresses сinematic creations of mentioned authors and teachings of Eurasian movement, especially by N. S. Trubetskoy. In his opinion, to analyze Russian history, one must take into account the geographical, political and economic components. He paid special attention to the geographical factor. The population of Russia-Eurasia includes various “human races”: both Slavic and Finno-Ugric peoples, as well as Turkic and Mongolian peoples. The Turan element occupies a significant part of the territory. Genghis-khan united all nomadic tribes under his sway and introduced Asian statehood in Russia. Moscow Rus form the basis of the Russian Empire after joining it former Golden Horde`s uluses. The views of N. S. Trubetskoy largely correlate with the ideas of avant-garde activists. The creations of the directors of the Russian avant-garde are also associated with the Asian theme. Eurasian ideas soaked up Soviet directors` minds and translated into culture, as well as into cinematic culture. Representatives of Russian avant-garde including D. Vetrov associated with futurists, LEF magazine and representatives of formal school, who in their turn were connected with Eurasians (R. Yakobson, for example). Eurasian teachings and avant-garde representatives` perceptions have common roots to be highlighted in Russian history. The scientific novelty of this study which involved comparative method is due to identifying similarities between them.

This article traces feminist affinities across images of shoes as signifiers of women’s precarious mobilities on the screen. Inspired by Catherine Russell’s methodology of parallax historiography, it investigates compelling images of shoes in women’s activist filmmaking from two different time periods and national cinemas. The footwear of Eva from Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916) and Mona from Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) lends itself to reflection on practices of feminist historiography and a figurative reconfiguration of the flâneuse as a feminist historian who critically revisits knowledge of the past and of the present to set both in motion.

Abstract This article covers a wide range of projects from the earliest epistemological challenges posed by video experiments in remote Central Australia in the 1980s to the emergence of indigenous filmmaking as an intervention into both the Australian national imaginary and the idea of world cinema. It also addresses the political activism that led to the creation of four national indigenous television stations in the early 21st century: Aboriginal People's Television Network in Canada; National Indigenous Television in Australia; Maori TV in New Zealand; and Taiwan Indigenous Television in Taiwan); and considers what the digital age might mean for indigenous people worldwide employing great technological as well as political creativity.

The subject of the article is the infl uence of the Ukrainian modernism tradition and avant-garde on painting evolving in the second half of the 20th century in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The author of this article focuses on trends that do not correspond with the aesthetics of socialist realism being developed in opposition to it. The subject of the analysis is the generation work that debuted during the “Khrushchev Thaw” (1956–1964), called the generation of the sixties or nonconformists. The fi rst term includes painters, writers, poets, cinema and theater makers, as well as social activists. The second term both narrows the fi eld of interest to visual arts and extends the timespan from the Khrushchev Thaw to Perestroika.

In January 2011, people around the world turned their attention to Cairo's Tahrir Square. The news network al-Jazeera quickly became a window onto the square and surrounding streets, and news reporters became eyewitnesses to historical events. Aware of the media spectacle unfolding around them, Egyptian protesters over the following weeks held up signs in Arabic and English and, maybe unknowingly, staged highly photogenic scenes, for instance when Christians formed a human chain to guard Muslims during their prayers, and vice versa. During the first few days of the uprising, the regime shut down cell phone and Internet networks to prevent activists from communicating, but it could not stop their taking pictures and filming with cell phones and cameras. Every moment was carefully recorded, and today multiple initiatives are collecting films, photos, and audio recordings to preserve them in digital archives. In July 2011, activists set up an open-air cinema at Tahrir Square to screen and discuss footage of the protests. Subsequently video materials became crucial pieces of evidence in the courtroom where the former President Mubarak and ex-Interior Minister Adly were being tried. The Egyptian revolution was a highly visible and “mediatized” event. Its history can and has been told in images.

Indigenous peoples have been misrepresented and underrepresented in media since the dawn of cinema, but they have never stopped telling their own stories and enacting agency. It is past time to recognize them on their own terms. To facilitate that, academics, activists, and industry partners can fund, hire, teach, and share more Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) led projects. The uniqueness of 2020 with COVID-19, Black Lives Matter and human rights movements, and the move online by many academics and organizations have deepened conversations about systemic inequities, such as those in media industries. To address the often-heard film industry excuse, “I don’t know anyone of color to hire,” the Nia Tero Foundation has created Kin Theory, an Indigenous media makers database, that is having a dynamic, year-long launch in 2021.

A luta das mulheres pela conquista de direitos, especialmente pelo direito civil e político ao voto, foi visível e teve nítido enfoque durante a denominada primeira onda do movimento feminista, que transcorreu pelos séculos XIX e XX. Muitos movimentos marcaram a reivindicação das mulheres pelo direito ao voto, em especial e como um dos mais marcantes, o movimento Sufragista. As Sufragistas, primeiras ativistas do feminismo no século XIX, passaram a ser conhecidas pela sociedade da época devido as suas fortes manifestações públicas em prol dos direitos políticos, com ênfase no direito ao voto. Esse cenário é retratado pelo filme As Sufragistas, estreado no ano de 2015, que relata a luta de mulheres pelo direito ao voto e o movimento sufragista liderado por Emmeline Pankhurst. O artigo problematiza o início da luta de gênero por direitos políticos, com ênfase nos estudos de Direito e Cinema. Dessa forma, a análise do resultado político na luta por direitos da primeira onda do movimento feminista pode ser exemplificado pelo filme As Sufragistas. O filme retrata as condições precárias da mulher no trabalho e sua submissão aos homens; mostra como o Direito e o Cinema podem relacionar-se com o intuito de explorar as realidades vivenciadas pelas mulheres em busca de seus direitos. Nesse sentido, o artigo objetiva, através da análise de cenas e linguagem do filme As Sufragistas, explorar a batalha das Sufragistas pela conquista do voto feminino e, consequentemente, demonstrar que, por meio do Cinema e através de suas imagens é possível retratar as realidades e, assim, as condições às quais as mulheres foram submetidas por longos anos. Palavras-chave: Direitos Humanos. Direitos Políticos. Cinema. Feminismo.Abstract: Women’s struggle for rights, especially civil and political right to vote, had a clear focus during the first wave of the feminist movement that went through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many movements marked the women’s claim to the right to vote, in particular and one of the most striking, the Sufragist movement. Sufragists, the first activists of feminism in the nineteenth century, came to be known by the society of the time due to its strong public manifestations for political rights, especially the right to vote. This scenario is portrayed by the film Suffragette, released in the year 2015, which relates the struggle of women for the right to vote and the suffragist movement led by Emmeline Pankhurst. The purpose of this article is to analyze the beginning of the gender struggle for political rights, with emphasis on Law and Cinema studies. In this way, the analysis of the political outcome in the struggle for rights of the first wave of the feminist movement can be exemplified by the film Suffragette. The film portrays the precarious conditions of women at work and their submission to men; Shows how law and cinema relate to the purpose of exploring the realities experienced by women in search of their rights. In this sense, the present article aims, trought the analysis of scenes and language of the film Suffragette, to explore the battle of Sufragists by the conquest of the feminine vote and, consequently, demonstrate trought the Cinema and trought images it is possible to portray the realities and thus the conditions to which women were submitted. Keywords: Cinema. Feminism. Human Rights. Political Rights.

Dr. Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife, explores, in the context of the development of cinema, how the concept of “the animal” has become central to modern understandings of human subjectivity. Lippit considers the disappearance of real animals and their concurrent appearance in various conceptual and material uses, particularly noting the ways in which the conjoined notions of humanity and animality figure into and through cinema. The animal, he argues, haunts the foundation of western logical systems. Yet, despite the fact that humans and animals suffer under the discursive weight of the signifier, Lippit is careful to note the increasing instability of the human-animal boundary and what might be done to realize more just relationships among both humans and other animals. On February 12, 2008, Lauren Corman spoke with Lippit as part of the “Animal Voices” radio program, a weekly show dedicated to animal advocacy and cultural critique. They discussed how Lippit developed his thesis and the ramifications of his theoretical work. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife was published in 2000 by the University of Minnesota Press. “Animal Voices” can be heard weekly on CIUT 89.5 FM in Toronto, or online at animalvoices.ca.Full TextLauren Corman: How have questions regarding animals and animality figured into your film scholarship? When did you bring these themes into your work, and why? Akira Mizuta Lippit: That is its own story in a way. The book that you refer to, Electric Animal, was written initially as my doctoral dissertation, and at the time, I was thinking in particular about the moment at which cinema appeared in the late 19th century. There are all kinds of phantasmatic and imaginary birthdays of cinema, but generally people agree that 1895, or thereabouts, was when cinema appeared as a set of technological, aesthetic, and cultural features, and as an economic mode of exchange. People sold and bought tickets and attended screenings. And I was thinking about what it must have felt like at that moment to experience this uncanny medium. There are various reports of early film performances and screenings, some of them apocryphal and inventive and embellished and so forth, but I think the fascination, the kind of wonder that cinema evoked among many early viewers had to do with this uncanny reproduction of life, of living movement, and the strange tension that it created between this new technology (and we are in the middle of the industrial revolution and seeing the advent of all sorts of technologies and devices and apparatuses), and its proximity to, in a simple way, life: the movements of bodies. And I began to think that the principle of animation, here was critical. To make something move, and in thinking about the term animation and all of its roots, to make something breathe, to make something live. What struck me, in this Frankensteinian moment was the sense that something had come to life, and the key seemed to be about how people understood, conceived of, and practiced this notion of animating life through a technology. I started to hear a resonance between animals and animation. I started to think about the way in which animals also played a role, not only in early cinema and in animation and the practice of the genre but leading up to it in the famous photographs of Edward Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, the moving images of animals that were produced serially, as well as the “chronophotographs” that rendered animal motion. And it occurred to me that there was a reason to pause and think about what role animals were playing at that moment in history. As I began to read, and as I began to collect materials and to think through this question of the status and function of the animal, what animality meant, it took on its own set of values, and essentially Electric Animal ended up being a kind of preamble, or an introduction to a book that I haven’t yet written, because I only reach at the end of the book, and in a very perfunctory manner, the advent of cinema. So in a sense, this book, and this question, about what an animal meant for generations before, at that moment and in successive generations, became its own subject, one I still think is critically linked to the question of cinema, and the arrival of cinema, and the force of cinema throughout the 20th century. LC: Let’s return to that piece that you mentioned about life, and that cinema could show or play this Frankensteinian role; of course, a parallel stream is around death, and some of the work that I have read about early cinema shows that people were quite afraid, initially, of what it meant. Could you comment on that theme of death and the animal in cinema? AML: This emerged as a major issue during the course of my study. The discourse on death and the uncanny, the idea that something appears to be there, in the form of a ghost or a phantom, already existed in discussions of photography throughout the 19th century. The sense that photography forges a material connection to the object, that the photograph establishes a material connection to the photographed object, and as such when you look at a photograph you are not simply looking at a rendering, like an artist’s interpretation in a painting or sculpture, but you are actually looking at, experiencing a kind of carnal, physical contact with the persons themselves, or with an object, reappears frequently in the discourses on photography. This creates a real excitement, and also fear. I think that effect, the photographic effect of somehow being in the presence of the thing itself, is enhanced by the addition of movement, because with movement you have the feeling that this being is not just there, looking at you perhaps, but also moving in its element, in its time, whether (and this is very important to the discussions of photography) that person is still alive or not. I think that gap is produced at the moment of any photograph and perhaps in any film: the person who appears before you, who appears to be alive, who at that moment is alive, may or may not still be alive. So it produces, among those who have thought in this way, a sense of uncanniness, something is there and isn’t there at once. Where I think that this is particularly important in this discussion of “the animal,” and as I began to discover in doing the reading (I should add that I am not a philosopher, I don’t teach philosophy, but I am a reader of philosophy; I read it sporadically, I read here and there wherever my interests are) is that with very few but important exceptions, there is a line of western philosophy that says animals are incapable of dying. On the most intuitive level this seems nonsensical. Of course animals die. We know that animals die. We kill animals; we kill them andwe see them die. No question that animals die. But the philosophical axiom here—which begins with Epicurus, but is repeated over and over, by Descartes perhaps most forcefully, and in the 20th century by Martin Heidegger—is that death is not simply a perishing, the end of life, but it is a experience that one has within life, a relationship with one’s own end. The claim that is made over and over again, which has been disputed by many people – and it is certainly not my claim – but the claim that one finds repeatedly in philosophy is that animals don’t die – they don’t have death in the way human beings have, and carry with them, death. Animals know fear, they know things like instinctual preservation, they seek to survive, but they don’t have death as an experience. Heidegger will say in the most callous way, they simply perish. It struck me that this problem was not a problem of animals, but rather a problem for human beings. If human beings don’t concede the capacity of animals to die, then what does it mean that animals are disappearing at this very moment, in the various developments of industry, in human population, in urbanization, environmental destruction, that animals are increasingly disappearing from the material and everyday world? And where do they go, if we don’t, as human beings, concede or allow them death? (Of course this is only in a very specific, and one might argue, very small, discursive space in western philosophy. Many people have pointed out that this is not the case in religious discourses, in a variety of cultural practices, and in various ethnic and cultural communities. This is a certain kind of western ideology that has been produced through a long history of western philosophy.) So the question of death, the particular form of suspended death that photography and cinema introduced appeared in response to perhaps a crisis in western critical and philosophical discourse that denied to the animal, to animals, the same kind of death that human beings experience. You have this convergence of two death-related, life-anddeath related, problems at a time when I think that these issues were particularly important. LC: So from there, the question that comes to mind is what purpose does it serve and the word that is coming to mind is identity, and the idea of human identity and subjectivity. There must be some reason that western thought keeps going back to this denial of animal death. You tie it in, as others have, to language. AML: Two key features of human subjectivity, in the tradition of western philosophy, have been language and death, and the relationship between language and death. This goes back to Plato, to Socrates, and before. The point at which I was writing Electric Animal, at the end of the 20th century, gave me the ability to look back at developments in critical theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas throughout the 20th century, and it became clear with the significant interventions of the late 1960s that from at least one century earlier, the question of human subjectivity, its stability, its absoluteness, had already been in question. This question is slowly working its way toward a radical re-evaluation of the status of, the value of, and ultimately the confidence that human beings place in their own subjectivity, and there are many, many influences: around questions of gender and sexuality, questions of race and identity, and in crimes like genocide, for example, during World War II, but before and after as well. All of these developments contribute to this reevaluation, but one could argue that at this moment, in the late 19th century already, there was a certain sense that what had been insisted upon as absolutely unique, as an absolute form in itself – the human subject – required a whole series of constant exclusions and negations for it to survive. One such exclusion is to claim as properly human, language; what makes the human being human, is the capacity for language, and through this capacity, the capacity for death. As many philosophers argue, only human beings can name death as such, because language gives us the capacity to names those things, not just objects around us, but to name those things that do not appear before us, and these would be the traditional philosophical objects: love, death, fear, life, forgiveness, friendship, and so on. And it will be assumed that animals have communication, they communicate various things within their own groups and between groups, they signal of course, but that animals don’t have language as such, which means they can’t name those things that are not before them or around them. And it is very clear that there is an effort among human beings to maintain the survival of this precious concept of human subjectivity, as absolutely distinct and absolutely unique. So you find in those long discourses on human subjectivity, this return to questions of language and death. I would suggest that at this time, with the appearance of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, and with other disruptive thinkers like Sigmund Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis, there is a great sense of uncertainty regarding these edifices of human subjectivity, language and death. In Electric Animal this moment is particularly rich with such shifts and instabilities, and the sense that language is not exclusive to human beings, as many people thought, but also that language is not as self-assured in human beings as people thought. Here psychoanalysis plays an important role in indicating, at least speculatively, that we are not as in control of the language that we use to the extent that we would like to believe. LC: What are the consequences of this process in western thought, where the subject is conceived through an exclusion or a negation of the animal? What are the implications for humans, and also what are the implications for animals? I know that is a huge question. AML: It is a huge question; It is a very important question. One could argue that the consequences of a certain practice, let’s say, of the politics of the subject have been disastrous, certainly for animals, but also for human beings. If you take one of the places where the form of the human subject is created, it would be Descartes’ Discourse on Method, his attempt to figure out what, when everything that can be doubted and has been doubted, is left to form the core. And this is his famous quote: “Je pense donc je suis”, I think therefore I am, I am thinking therefore I am. If you read the Discourse on Method, this is a process of exclusion: I exclude everything that I am not to arrive at the central core of what I am. The process he follows leads him to believe that it is his consciousness, it is his presence, his selfpresence with his own consciousness that establishes for him, beyond any doubt, his existence. This is somewhat heretical, it is a break from theological discourses of the soul; it represents a form of self-creation through one’s consciousness. But consciousness is a very complicated thing, a very deceptive thing, because what I believe, what I feel, is not always exactly the way things are. Looking at a series of important shifts that have taken place during what we might call generally the modern period, which extends further back than the recent past, one finds a number of assaults on the primacy of consciousness. Freud names one as the Copernican revolution, which suggested that the earth was not the centre of the universe and that human beings were not at the centre of the universe; the Darwinian revolution, which suggested that humans beings were not created apart from other forms, all other forms of organic life, and that human beings shared with other animate beings, organic beings a common history, a pre-history. And Freud (he names himself as the third of these revolutionaries), is the one who suggested that consciousness itself is not a given at any moment, or available at any moment, to us as human beings. What constitutes our sense of self, our consciousness, is drawn from experiences that we no longer have access to—interactions with others, the desires of others, the kinds of influences and wishes that were passed into us through others, our parents, other influential figures early in our life— and that what we believe to be our conscious state, our wishes, desires, dreams and so forth, are not always known to us, and in fact can’t be known because they might be devastating and horrifying, in some cases. They will tell us things about ourselves that we couldn’t properly accept or continue to live with. I think that what is happening, certainly by the time that we enter the 20th century, around this discourse of the subject is that it is no longer holding, it is no longer serving its original purpose; it is generating more anxiety than comfort. Key historical events, World War I, for example, are producing enormous blows to the idea of western progress, humanism, and Enlightenment values, to the cultural achievements of the West— Hegel, for example, a 19th century philosopher, is very explicit about this—to those values that helped to shape the world, and ultimately were supposed to have created a better world for human beings: the Enlightenment, the pursuit of knowledge, science, medicine, religion and so forth. And yet, by the mid-twentieth century many of these beliefs were exposed as illusions, especially after the advent of death camps, camps created for the sole purpose of producing, as Heidegger himself says, producing corpses, a factory for corpses. It’s not a place where people happen to die. This is an entire apparatus designed in order to expeditiously, efficiently, and economically, create corpses out of living human beings. Similarly, with the first use of the atomic bomb, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, on human beings. This was a machine, a science, a technology, a weapon devised for maximizing, efficiently and economically, the destruction of human beings. I think what this created for many thinkers, philosophers, writers, artists, activists, citizens around the world was a sense that in fact what had helped to create this situation and these catastrophic results was not a matter of totalitarian regimes and bad politics, but something more fundamental: a certain belief that I have the right to destroy or take life from others. And how is that achieved? By first denying that those others are like me. So the discourse on Jews practiced throughout Nazi Germany is in fact even more extreme than that of the discourse on animals; in fact, as many people have pointed out, that many Nazis were famous for their love of animal, some were practicing vegetarians; they outlawed animal experimentation. In a sense animals were more like Aryan Germans, than Jews were. You have a series here of rhetorics that allow you to cast the enemy, the Other, at a distance from your own subjectivity, and in order to achieve this you have to deny them any form of subjectivity. Not just that they are just culturally different, or that they engage in different practices: They are radically and absolutely unlike me. And I believe that as many people began to think about this condition (Adorno has a very famous passage in which he talks about this), it became clear that one of the sources of this, is in fact the very ideology of the subject, which insists on an absolute autonomy, singularity, and distinct mode of existence from that which is not the subject, not any subject, the Other. Adorno, in a passage he wrote in a book titled Minima Moralia, which is a collection of aphorisms and observations he wrote during and after World War II, offers an observation I quote in Electric Animal. He titles it “People are looking at you”, and he says there is a moment in a typical scene of hunting where a wounded animal looks into the eyes of the hunter, or the killer as it dies. It produces at that moment, an effect that is undeniable: This thing, that is alive, that I have wounded and which is now dying, is looking at me. How can I deny that it is alive, that it is there, that it exists in the world, with its own consciousness, its own life, its own dreams, and desires? Adorno says the way you shake this off is you say to yourself, “It’s only an animal.” He will then link that gesture to the history of racism, and what he calls the pogrom, or genocide, against other human beings. You transfer this logic. So the ability to say to an animal, toward an animal that you have killed, whose death you’ve brought about, “It’s only an animal”, becomes the same logic you apply to other human beings when you harm or kill them. It’s a very profound observation because it suggests that in fact there is no line that separates the killing of animals from the killing of human beings. And in fact already at the moment when we kill an animal, we recognize something immediately that we have to erase from our consciousness with this phrase, “It’s only an animal.” LC: It seems to me then, too, that it’s this kind of perpetual haunting, because in that erasure, in that statement, “It’s only an animal,” there’s the animal itself that you had to assert yourself against and its living beingness. Do you think in that moment that he’s talking about—because it seems like kind of a struggle, or a narrative that you have to tell yourself—do you think that is also a moment potentially of agency, or resistance, in terms of an assertion of an animal subjectivity, or umwelt, or however you want to describe it? AML: Absolutely, and I think that Adorno’s phrase and that passage in which he is writing about this scene, an arbitrary, perhaps imaginary but typical scene of the hunt written shortly after the end of World War II, as well as all of Adorno’s pessimistic observations about the state of human culture, are written in a state of deep anguish. As he says in this very brief aphorism, we never believe this, even of the animal. When we tell ourselves, “It’s only an animal”, we in fact never believe it. Why? Because we are there and we see in the presence of an Other, a life that is there. For him it is important that the gaze, as he says, of the wounded animal, falls on the person who has perpetrated the crime. You seek to exclude it, to erase it, to dismiss it by saying that it is only an animal, but it allows you to transfer that very logic into the destruction of other human beings. Your phrase “haunting” is really important because I think that it suggests that a phantom animal becomes the crucial site not only for an animal rights, but for human ethics as well. The ability to kill another, is something in fact we—we, human beings—never properly achieve; we never truly believe this, “It’s only an animal” at that moment, Adorno says. We tell ourselves this, we insist upon it, try to protect ourselves through this mantric repetition of a phrase, “It’s only an animal,” “It’s only an animal,” yet we never believe it. And as such, we are haunted by it. I think the crisis in human subjectivity, in discourses on the human subject that arrive in the late 1950s, has everything to do with this kind of haunted presence. Human subjectivity is now a haunted subjectivity, haunted by animals, by everyone that has been excluded, by women, by people of different races, different ethnicities, different sexual preferences. And in fact the convergence of civil rights, critical theory, animal rights, feminism, the gay and lesbian movements, all of these things really shape—to use Foucault’s term—the episteme in which the primary political focus for many philosophers and theorists erupts in a critique of the subject. LC: Without getting you to offer something prescriptive [both laugh] about where to go from here, I do, I guess, want to ask about where to go from here. Because our audience is sort of the average person, turning on their car radio, or the animal rights activist, what does this mean then for… It just seems like a huge juggernaut, this huge weight, of Western history for people who want to shift, or people talk about blurring the boundaries between humans and animals (and this, of course, is very anxiety-provoking considering the legacy of Western thought), where is the turn now? Or where do you think there are potentials for (I think your phrase is) “remembering animals”? Is that the best can we can do? AML: Again, it’s an important question in so many ways. There are so many things I would like to speak to in response to that question. I would say that I don’t know if I am, by nature, an optimist or a pessimist. I do think, however, that a lot of things have been turning away from this condition, let’s say, or a certain kind of assumption, about the longevity of the human subject. I think that human subjectivity practiced honestly and ethically will continue to re-evaluate the terms of its own existence in relationship to Others, defined in the modern sense. And I do think that a certain ability to exist with an Other—an Other that may not share the same language that I speak, but certainly exists in a world that is as valuable, authentic, legitimate, as my own—will be the goal. I’ll introduce a phrase by Jacques Derrida. Somebody asked him, what does justice mean? What would justice be? He says justice is speaking to the Other in the language of the Other. I find this to be a very beautiful and very optimistic expression. It is not my task to exclude from my world those that I don’t understand; but it is my responsibility, or it is the practice or task of justice, to learn the Other’s language, which is to give the Other that capacity for language, to assume that there is in the Other, language. Language is, according to that earlier part of our conversation, language is that which is traditionally denied to the Other. “I don’t know what you mean when you speak”;, “women speak emotionally”; “ animals don’t have any language”; “the language that less developed cultures speak is not as articulate or precise as the language that I speak”, and so on and so forth. I think this pursuit of justice, defined as Derrida does, is very important. The other thing I will add is that the development of a field that some have called, perhaps temporarily, provisionally “Animal Studies”, is absolutely critical. I think there was a time when Animal Studies would have meant zoology, or in a very focused and direct manner, the pursuit of animal rights. What has been really been exciting for me to observe in this field of animal studies— and it’s not merely a community of scholars and academics; they are artists and performers, who engage in expressive and creative actions, activists who are committed politically, activists who are engaged in their daily lives and daily practices, and also a wide range of scholars in a variety of fields (feminists, literary scholars, historians, historians of ideas, philosophers, and so forth)—there is a certain understanding that “the question of the animal”, as it’s been called, or “of animals” or “of animality”, is not something that is restricted in the end just to the well-being of animals: it affects everybody in fact in ways that are obvious and perhaps less obvious. I think this kind of realization and this kind of community, let’s say, ex-community of people, who are in the field but also outside of their fields but in contact with one another is another way in which, much of what has been established can being critiqued, rethought, unthought, reformulated, toward a viable existence for all forms of life on this earth, and elsewhere. LC: It seems to me that it’s a difficult but important place to be, working in Animal Studies, in these divergent fields. My own experience was coming from Women’s Studies. It’s interesting how you point to these different groups, marginalized groups, and I think that one of the saddest things for me has been also that there’s this incredible moment of optimism, and potential to be thinking about “the animal” in different ways, (and thus us in different ways) but also in those moments of marginalization there has been a scrambling, a push towards a reinforcement of that human subject to say, “Ah, we are just like that, though. We are not like animals.” I think that this is very classic, in terms of an older feminism: liberation is about inclusion into a human culture that is necessarily exclusionary of animals. I think that’s still happening, that while there’s a kind of opening up of what this question means, “the question of the animal”, there’s also a concern, my concern anyway, that a simultaneous reinforcement as marginalized groups fight, using language, using the discourse of rights, etc., to become a part of what they were always excluded from. AML: That’s right. That’s a very difficult situation that traditionally marginalized groups have had to address. When you have been denied very basic civil rights, for example, one of the immediate and legitimate goals of any movement is to make sure that one secures those rights for one’s constituencies, for one’s members, and at the same time to make sure that the pursuit or achievement of that right does not reproduce the exclusion of others that one was fighting against initially. That’s why I think the role of animal rights is so important, because the animal is perhaps the place where life as such has been most excluded in the history of human cultures. And as such it is the place, perhaps, where this rethinking has to begin. There will be all sorts of differences, and all sorts of different objectives and agendas, but when this discussion is practiced rigorously and in good faith, I think ultimately it will be productive. Remember that most of those whom we now think of as the great thinkers were often marginalized in their time; many endured this marginalization, ridicule, hostility. It’s part of the task, and I think one of the comforts we can draw in these situations is that the process is ongoing and one makes a contribution where one can, one engages where one can, and it continues forward hopefully toward some better formulation of life for all beings. LC: Thank you very much. I hope you can join us again on the program sometime. It was really a great honour, and a great pleasure, to speak with you today. AML: It was a great pleasure for me today. And I really appreciate the work you’re doing. The questions were just fantastic. I enjoyed every moment of it. LC: Thank you so much. Today we’ve been speaking with Dr. Akira Mizuta Lippit.

The image of the Arab and Muslim woman, whether as sexually obsessed and oppressed or simply a backward terrorist invented and reinvented in the studios of Orientalist filmmakers, has been an object for decades (and hardly a subject) of imperial Orientalist discourse. From being depicted as repressed mysterious harems sexually outfoxing one another to gain the sheik’s attention to eroticised veiled belly dancers alluring the audience to eventually fanatical extremists threatening the United States, Arab and Muslim women’s representation reflects that Hollywood cinema had reached its sexist and racist height long before the September 11 attacks. By presenting them as voiceless and unable to speak for themselves, the entire industry not only undermine the efforts of female Arab and Muslim activists to achieve gender equality but also acts and reacts within a vicious hegemonic patriarchal discourse that hinders their progressive attempts to better their image.