Journal articles on the topic 'Gangster films'

Gangster films are largely an urban genre set in the mean streets of metropolitan ganglands. A significant proportion of South Korean gangster films depart from this spatial convention, however, setting their central family or romance plots in the domestic space of the apartment. This article addresses the question of why we find gangsters in domestic space in South Korean cinema and examines what the domestic setting ‘does’ to the gangster film. The Show Must Go On (2008) is discussed in detail to exemplify the ways that questions of masculinity, gendered family role performance and class anxieties are crystallized around domestic space. What emerges in this spatial shift is a new sub-genre, the ‘family drama gangster film’. This form combines elements of the traditional gangster narrative with family melodrama, producing tension between the conflicting obligations of the gangster towards gang and family. The article concludes that the family drama gangster film emerged as a response to a conjunction of socio-economic and film industry factors and became a vehicle through which conflict between competing ideologies of Korean familism is negotiated, mostly resolving in favour of affective familism.

In this paper through a very close textual reading I will show the ideological differences between two films based on the life of Shanghai gangster Du Yuesheng (1888, Pudong – 1951, Hong Kong) through close formal and narrative analysis. Du was already a celebrity in his day in the Republican era and is still a con-troversial figure in Greater China. However, there are only two films based on the life of the French Con-cession opium kingpin, the recent Hong Kong/PRC co-production The Last Tycoon (Da Shang Hai, Wong Jing, 2012) and the epic two part Lord of the East China Sea I & II (Shang Hai huang di zhi: Sui yue feng yun & Shang Hai huang di zhi: Xiong ba tia xia, Hong Kong, Poon Man-kit 1993). I show how these films reflect HK's and China's politico-economic changes focusing on the representation of social class and the subject, depiction of internal migration and immigration, and nationalism. The films will be discussed in their relation to changes in the Hong Kong film industry, Chinese and world cinema and the transnational gangster genre, showing how local and global cinemas have affected these films.

Abstract The present study aims to investigate the contribution that actor Edward G. Robinson brought to the American film industry, beginning with his iconic role as gangster Little Caesar in Mervyn Le Roy’s 1931 production, and continuing with widely-acclaimed parts in classic film noirs such as Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. Edward G. Robinson was actually a Romanian Jew, born Emmanuel Goldenberg in Bucharest, in 1893, a relatively little known fact nowadays. By examining his biography, filmography and his best-known, most successful films (mentioned above), I show that Edward G. Robinson was one of classical Hollywood’s most influential actors; for instance, traits of his portrayal of Little Caesar (one of the very first American gangster films) can be found in almost all subsequent cinematic gangster figures, from Scarface to Vito Corleone. In the same vein, the doomed noir characters he played in Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street are still considered by film critics today to be some of the finest, most nuanced examples of noir heroes. Therefore, the main body of my article will be dedicated to a more detailed analysis of these films, while the introductory section will trace his biography and discuss some of his better-known films, such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Key Largo. The present study highlights Edward G. Robinson’s merits and impact on the cinema industry, proving that this diminutive Romanian Jew of humble origins was indeed something of a giant during Hollywood’s classical era.

This research aims to determine what kind of market representation is displayed in three Indonesian films namely Di Bawah Lindungan Ka’bah, Gangster, Rumah Hantu Pasar Malam and how the viewers interpret it through various internet platform. The qualitative research design in the field of cultural studies especially the theory of representation and encoding-decoding from Hall is used to analyze data in the present study. By researching the above factors, we aim to provide more information toward the meaning of Indonesian films from the point of view of cultural studies.

While many recent male-directed lesbian-couplefocused films contain murdering or violent lesbians, the dyke mob thriller Bound stands apart. This study analyzes the film in terms of three issues—the presentation of the female body and lesbian sex, stereotyping, and a caricature of the gangster genre—and shows how Bound avoids selling out to or alienating the mass audience while successfully providing a needed space for polyvalent identification and pleasure.

As Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell note, archetypes, or general ideas of human types, strongly influence societies, particularly the heroic archetype. Since the 1890s mainstream cinema has facilitated the heroic archetype for worldwide audiences. This article argues that Paul Muni (1895-1967), Edward G. Robinson (1893-1973), and John Garfield (1913-1952) became the first important Jewish-American film actors to help develop the ambiguous heroic archetype in the United States’ studio system from 1929 through 1948 in two ways: Muni’s and Robinson’s critical performances in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in gangster and film noir films, and Garfield’s films from 1946 through 1948.

The films of French director Robert Bresson are considered sober and transcendental. However, in A gentle woman (1969) and in Four nights of a dreamer (1972), he included extracts of quite different genres, like a libertine comedy (the extract of film Benjamim by Michel Deville, 1968), a Shakespearean tragedy (a performance of Shakespeare´s Hamlet) and a gangster film (When love possesses us, produced by Bresson himself). In a way, those excerpts represent exactly the opposite of Bresson´s cinema. On the other hand, they still have some familiarity with it. We analyze the approach of those genres in the sequences in Bresson´s films, as well of the styles present in them by the use of music and images of paintings.

ABSTRACT: One of the most striking genre conventions to emerge in Danish cinema in recent years is the gangster motif. Replete with gritty social realism, urban decay, and tribal warfare between different ethnic groups, these films reflect a growing discontent in the Danish welfare state, particularly regarding multiculturalism and inclusion. This article follows these trends from the mid-1990s, focusing specifically on the themes of ethnic division in four films: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher (1996), Michael Noer’s Nordvest (2013) [Northwest], Omar Shargawi’s Gå med fred, Jamil (2008) [Go With Peace, Jamil], and Michael Noer and Tobias Lindholm’s R (2010) [R: Hit First, Hit Hardest]. The article explores racial division in these films by examining how they reflect or subvert cultural and political approaches towards diversity in Denmark over the last two decades.

The article overviews the American cinema of the 1930 in terms of the “cyclic conception” stating that the life of American society is subject to a distinctive algorhithm of public mood: “social restlessness” alternating with “private interest”. The author surveys gangster film, one of the dominating genres of the Depression cinema as exemplified by “The Pubic Enemy (1931, dir. William A. Wellman). The article also traces the links of the “social restlessness” films of the 1930s with the previous and subsequent phases stressing the problem of dividing each phase into stages: formation, prime and decline.

Early in the Great Depression, Gerald W. Johnson remarked on the “fathomless pessimism” that had overtaken the American People: “The energy of the country has suffered a strange paralysis … We are in the doldrums, waiting not even hopefully for the wind which never comes.” Film developments of the decade were entwined with the ongoing economic crisis. This article offers an analysis of the extreme shifts in confidence in this period and argues for their relationship with the evolution of film noir, which had its roots in two film genres prominent in the period, the gangster and fallen-woman films, but which breaks with these genres, not after the onset of World War II, which has long been believed, but in the closing years of the 1930s.

William Shakespeare has been part of the cinema since 1899. In the twentieth century almost a thousand films in some way based upon his plays were made, but the vast majority of those which sought to faithfully present his plays to the cinema audience failed at the box office. Since the start of the twenty-first century only one English language film using Shakespeare’s text has made a profit, yet at the same time Shakespeare has become a popular source for adaptations into other genres. This essay examines the reception of a number of adaptations as gangster films, teen comedies, musicals and thrillers, as well as trans-cultural assimilations. But this very proliferation throws up other questions, as to what can legitimately be called an adaptation of Shakespeare. Not every story of divided love is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Different adaptations and assimilations have enjoyed differing degrees of success, and the essay interrogates those aspects which make the popular cinema audience flock to see Shakespeare in such disguised form, when films which are more faithfully based upon the original plays are so much less appealing to the audience in the Multiplexes.

Malaysia is a melting pot of cultures and a country that consists of various ethnic groups and races that livetogether in the similar surroundings. However, the similarity between every race is that most individualsview action fi lms as merely a form of entertainment and get away from stress. Action fi lms have becomea popular genre among youngsters these days. The long hours of television viewing have contributedto this fact. Youngsters of the current generation are exposed to the negative eff ects of media violencein action movies due to their social activities in which they are consumed by the media itself. Theseeff ects have a great impact on our society that regarding their perceptions and thoughts about the world.Many researchers have studied similar social issues, and several theories have been picked to supportthe central objective of the research. Thus, this research intends to study the impact of fi lms exhibitingmedia violence towards potential viewers regarding their behaviour and personality and examine therole of action fi lms depicting extensive violence and brutality in creating distorted perception among thecollege youths regarding social reality. Additionally, the research focuses on examining the popularity andpreference of the movie KL Gangster, representing the action genre in the Malaysian cinema industryamong youths and the extent of imitation of violent actions portrayed in action fi lms among potentialviewers in their daily lifestyle. Furthermore, the research also intends to examine the relationship betweenimitation, preference, behaviour and personality with the eff ects exerted by depictions of media violencein action movies on the perception of youngsters. Anak muda generasi sekarang terdedah kepada kesan negatif keganasan media dalam fi lem tindakandisebabkan oleh aktiviti sosial mereka di mana mereka dikonsumsi oleh media itu sendiri. Kesan-kesanini mempunyai kesan yang besar kepada masyarakat kita dari segi persepsi dan pemikiran merekatentang dunia. Ramai penyelidik telah mengkaji isu sosial yang sama dan beberapa teori telah dipilihuntuk menyokong objektif utama penyelidikan. Oleh itu, kajian ini bertujuan untuk mengkaji kesanfi lem yang menunjukkan keganasan media ke arah penonton yang berpotensi dari segi tingkah lakudan keperibadian mereka dan mengkaji peranan fi lem tindakan yang menggambarkan keganasan dankekejaman yang meluas dalam mewujudkan persepsi yang menyimpang di kalangan golongan muda darisegi sosial realiti. Selain itu, kajian ini menumpukan perhatian untuk meneliti populariti dan keutamaanfi lem KL Gangster, yang mewakili genre aksi di industri perfi leman Malaysia di kalangan belia dan sejauhmana tiruan terhadap tindakan ganas yang digambarkan dalam fi lem tindakan di kalangan penontonyang berpotensi dalam gaya hidup seharian mereka. Selain itu, kajian ini juga bertujuan untuk mengkajihubungan antara tiruan, keutamaan, tingkah laku dan keperibadian dengan kesan yang ditunjukkan olehgambaran keganasan media dalam fi lem tindakan mengenai persepsi golongan muda.

Following a path established in Robert Warshow’s chapter on “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” this article attempts to look at connections between the ancient genre of tragedy and contemporary mob movies. On the one hand, there are structural parallels when it comes to plot, which adheres to the formula of decline, brought about by erroneous judgments. On the other hand, mobsters are often portrayed as powerful, ruthless tyrants who retain a kind of Shakespearean grandeur. Using examples from films by Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, and Ridley Scott, my argument links contemporary American crime drama to the origins of tragedy (as laid out by Aristotle in Poetics) and some canonical examples of the genre, like The Merchant of Venice. Having established this theoretical framework, I shall offer a detailed discussion of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, one of the most successful mob movies in recent years. In this film, Scorsese toys with the tragic genre both on the level of plot and with regard to his flawed characters, who struggle to overcome guilt and tragic hubris, yet cannot escape their inevitable tragic downfall.

Through the concept of ‘character’ or ‘urban racial type’, traversing literature, science and metropolitan life, Bertellini reconsiders early American cinema's colour-based biracialism epitomized by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). In the New York-based film industry race also emerged from the city's dense intermingling of ‘white ethnics’ and broader shifts in epistemological emphasis – from inheritance to the environment. If Italian immigrants were racialized as innately violent in early gangster films, after 1915 heartbreaking melodramas of destitution and misfortunes adopted instead a combination of still othering and universal characterizations.Half the people in ‘the Bend’ are christened Pasquale…When the police do not know the name of an escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale and send the name out on alarm; in nine cases out of ten it fits. Jacob Riis, 1890I like to play the Italian because his costume, his mannerisms, his gestures, and his unlikeness to the everyday people of the street make him stand out as a romantic and picturesque person. Actor and director George Beban, 1921

Globalization has found its way into all areas of everyday life, including, or rather especially into the media sector. As a result, film productions and visual productions in general, regardless of their origin, have conquered the whole world. Audio-visual translation has also contributed to this development by breaking down the barriers between languages and cultures. In the first part of this paper, the categories of audio-visual translation are discussed, briefly describing the different types of intra- and interlingual translation. It also discusses the intersemiotic or multimodal transfer and it defines this type of transfer as multidimensional translation, according to Gerzymisch-Arbogast. The second part provides an overview of the audio-visual translation type in different European countries and briefly introduces them: subtitling, dubbing, voice-over. The translation procedures proposed by Gottlieb for subtitling are taken as a starting point for the actual analysis of the relevant passages in the selected films in the last part of the paper (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998, Guy Ritchie), American Gangster (2007, Ridley Scott), The Last Days of American Crime (2020, Olivier Megaton)), applying them to the film extracts with profane expressions.

In her book Trauma Cinema (2005), Janet Walker is primarily interested in films that adopt catastrophe as their subject matter and trauma as their aesthetic in documentary treatments of incest and the Holocaust; but she also examines the classic Hollywood melodrama King’s Row, adapted from a book “spiced with harlots, idiots, nymphomaniacs and homosexuals,” concerning “three fathers who become sexually enamored of their daughters,” as well as “a sadistic doctor who performs unnecessary operations for the gloating pleasure of seeing his patients suffer to the human breaking point, and a whole horde of half-witted, sensual creatures preoccupied with sex” (to quote a contemporary review of the perverse source novel). Walker was especially interested in alterations deemed necessary in order to get the project past the Production Code, which certainly would have prohibited incest. We are interested in later standards that became less stringent in permitting screen representations of sex and violence after such groundbreaking pictures as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, particularly the popular and critical success of Francis Coppola’s The Godfather during the 1970s and its sequel, The Godfather, Part II —both of them brutal films when judged against earlier gangster pictures which, before 1968, could not have been so explicit and graphic. We will also discuss 1970s violence in the context of the Vietnam War—notably Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Born on the 4th of July, in an attempt to explain America’s demonstrable fascination with violence.

The article discusses the issues of gender identity and the crisis of masculinity in the Soviet and post-Soviet cinema in comparison with Western films. Social instability becomes the basis for rethinking cultural identity and expanding the typology of masculinity. This imbalance is most clearly visible in the cinema, which is a beneficial environment for actualizing problematic socio-cultural issues and forming some gender stereotypes and normative behaviors that later enter everyday reality. Following the West, the Russian cinema also focuses on the substantive side of the concept of “masculinity”, which is based on the specifics of national identity, traditional goals and social foundations. It is significant that the hegemonic masculinity characteristic of the Western cinema was not basically common in the Soviet era, whose masculinity model was the image of a leader, a worker, and, in the post-war period, a front-line soldier. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of capitalist relations in Russia caused the overthrow of former cultural values and the crisis of Soviet identity. The suppression of the male characters’ “sensitivity” was replaced by a total emancipation and sexuality, which can be witnessed in the abundance of scenes of a sexual nature in the films of the 1990s. However, in the post-Soviet cinema, the focus on the values of Western culture, in which a crisis of masculinity was already evident, stimulated the interest in the Russian image of masculinity, which initially manifested itself in romanticizing the image of a “fair gangster,” and later — in the appeal to traditional Russian and Soviet heroes. Since the 2010s, the glorification of the Russian criminal past has declined, opening the space for the emergence of new types of Russian masculinity. The general context of these transformations is represented by the changes of masculinity from the Soviet traumatic, through the post-Soviet (crisis) to the contemporary one.

The paper presents the research of poetics of the fourth novel «Stump» (2004) written by contemporary Welsh Anglophone author Niall Griffiths. The early works of Niall Griffiths have long been associated with the off-center tendency in contemporary British fiction, with novels written by Scottish authors such as Irvine Welsh, James Kelman, John King. This study attempts to demonstrate that Welsh writer doesn’t merely articulate the problems of the fringe groups of the society as well as shocking and taboo topics. Also to overcome the common postcolonial approach to Griffiths`s works which focuses on the concepts of «colonial othering», «forms of disability» etc. in the novels, the author of the article proposes the existential philosophy as methodological basis for this research. The study concentrates over the central problem of the human Being-in-the-world, the human life in the world of everydayness in Griffiths`s novel «Stump». Understanding «the everyday life», «everydayness» as common, routine life, full of daily automatic human actions (according to B. Waldenfels) the author aims to consider the boundaries of everyday life and the experience of overcoming the borders of everydayness in the novel discussed.The analysis demonstrates that narrative structure of the novel combines several modes and forms of narration. Interior monologue with steam of consciousness fragments is the form of representing the first plot line focusing on the one day of nameless recovering alcoholic who has lost his left arm to gangrene. «Style indirect libre» in first person plural form is used to finish each of the chapter devoted to one-armed hero and expresses his contradictory point of view on the «12 steps addiction recovery» program. The non-diegetic impersonal narrator (according to V. Shmid classification) introduces the second plot line devoted to the two gangsters who have set out from Liverpool on a mission to find and punish the one-armed man for a past misdeed. Their continual dialog sometimes is interrupted by the omnipresent narrator voice who conveys in form of indirect speech one of the gangster`s thoughts and his perceptive and ideological «point of view». A Griffiths`s fictional space can be divided on close/open, secular/sacral, everyday/non-everyday types. In the novel Wales natural world is opposed to any closed and narrow spaces. One-armed protagonist fills himself free and happy in the open space, where he communicates with birds, animals and meets a pantheistic God. Oppositely, two gangsters are afraid of open space in the middle of dangerous nature of Wales, when they leave native Liverpool. Having the works of K. Jaspers and M. Merleau-Ponty as the basis for our research, we conclude that the body for one-armed hero is an existential and temporal border, which transforms each moment of his life into an endless «boundary situation» (germ. Grenzsituation, according to K. Jaspers). A journey to unknown Wales gives a start to personal transformations for one of the gangsters – Alastair. Crossing the geographical border becomes a time of «boundarysituation» in Alastair`s existence. Consequently, the motives of the real Being, existential self-identity, meeting with the transcendent are concerned with the experience of overcoming the everydayness, crossing its boundaries.

Este trabalho tem a finalidade de apresentar uma breve análise a respeito de dois filmes lançados sobre a história do casal de gangsteres Bonnie Parker e Clyde Barrow.que atuaram na região do Texas, Estados Unidos durante a década de 1930, assim como suas diferenças e semelhanças com a história verdadeira do casal. O primeiro filme a ser analisado, “Bonnie e Clyde- Uma Rajada de Balas” (1967), e o segundo a minissérie para TV “Bonnie & Clyde” (2013), apresentam a carreira, assim como a popularidade, do casal de formas diferentes, gerando questionamentos a respeito de sua veracidade histórica, tema abordado no presente artigo a partir de análises de críticas e biografias escritas sobre os mesmos.

In Beyond Moral Judgment, Alice Crary defends a version of moral objectivism which turns on the idea that participation in moral life involves acquired affective proclivities: subjective capacities which nevertheless allow us to be receptive to objective features of the world. In this article, I draw out key aspects and implications of her account with reference to Joshua Oppenheimer's 2014 film The Look of Silence, a companion piece to 2012's The Act of Killing. The film depicts a series of confrontations between optometrist Adi Rukun and warlords and gangsters involved in massacres perpetrated during Indonesia's anti-communist purges. Many of the interviews were carried out under the pretext of conducting eye tests, and the optometric equipment Rukun affixes to the faces of the perpetrators – who often appear quite cavalier about or even proud of their deeds – functions as a stark metaphor for their failures to see the meaning and consequences of their actions. As I work to show, there is something disquieting for philosophy about these men, and the urge to call them monsters. In particular, they cause disquiet by tempting us to say that there are agents who lack the means to see all moral features of the world, or who simply do not feel anything in response to them. As I argue, these explanations are not open to Crary, but that may be a sign not of the weakness of her account but of the glibness of accounts to which they are.

Ville riche de ses universités prestigieuses, de ses laboratoires de recherche et entreprises de la finance ou de la Tech, Boston a longtemps connu une criminalité redoutable que les caméras de Hollywood ont su raconter au long de plusieurs films noirs. Si nombre de ces œuvres ont dépeint en particulier la communauté populaire d’origine irlandaise, gangrenée un temps par une violence endémique et de puissants gangsters, d’autres se sont attardées sur des figures célèbres du crime, comme l’étrangleur de Boston. Toutes soulignent la relative impuissance des forces de l’ordre, jusqu’au tragique attentat qui a frappé la ville en 2013 .

Depuis le fracassant Scarface de Brian De Palma en 1983, les narcotrafiquants ont connu une carrière florissante dans l’industrie du cinéma américain. Portraits – parfois complaisants – de gangsters, films d’action explosifs ou thrillers nerveux tentent d’esquisser le visage impitoyable des cartels qui sévissent à la frontière entre le Mexique et les États-Unis. Parmi les longs métrages des dernières années, certains frappent par leur réalisme. C’est notamment le cas de Traffic, du réalisateur américain Steven Soderbergh. Sorti en 2000, le film, qui a été salué par la critique et le public, a engrangé plus de 207 millions de dollars de recettes dans le monde 1 . Il s’est vu récompensé par de nombreux prix, dont l’Oscar du meilleur scénario adapté et l’Oscar du meilleur réalisateur. Son sujet, le trafic de cocaïne et les relations parfois ambivalentes qui existent entre les trafiquants et les hommes chargés de les arrêter, reste d’une brûlante actualité .

Abstract Electronic Arts’ The Godfather: The Game uses Mario Puzo's novel and Francis Ford Coppola's films as the raw material for new representations of Italian American ethnicity. In the game, viewers design their avatar. Unusual in the world of game design, this interface, dubbed “Mob Face,” limits players’ choices to narrow, stereotypically Italian American male physiognomy. After choosing everything from physical features to clothing, the player enters the game space as an in-group member of the Corleone Italian American crime family. The game's rules further complicate this construction of ethnicity by requiring players to engage in acts of violence and extortion in order for the narrative to progress. Despite reminders that players are not really Italian American gangsters, the game's design romanticizes regressive masculine norms and offers a fantasy of an all-powerful, exclusively White ethnic, male group creating troubling notions of ethnic, racial, and gender identities. Ultimately, The Godfather: The Game reframes not only the original text(s) on which it is based but also the meaning of Italian American ethnicity (and, by extension, other identity categories) in a digital space.

The HBO television series The Sopranos, produced by David Chase, achieved unprecedented critical acclaim and quickly established itself on both sides of the Atlantic as cult viewing. The fourth series, shown in the UK on Channel 4 in spring 2003, had already attracted record audiences in America and received 13 Emmy Award nominations. Not surprisingly, The Sopranos has generated several web sites and a considerable amount of literature, ranging from the usual spin-offs of television series, cds, scripts, collected reviews, and a number of more academic studies ranging from cultural studies through to explorations of the psychological aspects of the programme. At least one MA has been written dealing with the portrayal of psychotherapy in this series and in films. This is not as remarkable as it might seem given that therapy is central to the whole story. The main character, Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini), is the head of an Italian–American family living in New Jersey. However, like his name itself, “family” has a double meaning. Tony is also the head of a Mafia-style gang of mobsters, operating a “waste management company” and night club (The Bada Bing!). The two roles of family head are explored when Tony talks (or “sings”) to a psychiatrist (in addition to his gang-land counsellors) as a result of his anxiety attacks and depression. Thus, Tony Soprano, mobster, is presented as a troubled family man – troubled by his relationships with his wife, daughter, and son, and their futures, but also troubled by business rivalries and problems that arise from the nature of his “work” and colleagues. As one commentator writes, Tony is the subject of “profound moral ambiguity” and it is his struggle to come to terms with this that makes it possible for viewers to identify with him. It is also the focus of his sessions with the therapist, Dr Melfi (played by Lorraine Bracco).

Just when it seemed as if every variety of the gangster genre had been played out, Mainland Chinese director Zhang Yimou sprang a pleasant surprise with his film Shanghai Triad (Yao a yao yao dao wai po qiao, 1995). The film is probably the last collaboration between the director and Gong Li, the leading actress in all his previous films(1) and his off-screen partner until the completion of this film. Few gangster movies have been made in recent years that equal the film in its freshness, style, intelligence, sensual and lyrical beauty. However, in his interview with Zhang at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, Nigel Andrews reported that Zhang's latest film had been indifferently received by critics who thought no more of it than "just a gangster film" and a mere waste of the director's talent(2). Though under-appreciated as a gangster film, Shanghai Triad's merit has not been totally ignored....

This study examines the changed mythology of crime in the Hollywood gangster genre resulting from new representations of mafia in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. The trilogy will be viewed as a point of departure for new experimentations in the gangster genre in response to the Russian experience of mafia, namely in Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother film sequence. This analysis will discuss the key themes that appear in Coppola’s trilogy including family, masculinity, morality, and identity and consider the extent to which they either translate to or mutate in Balabanov’s sequence. This research will also explore how Balabanov infuses his films with unique Russian stylistic elements from the bylina (fairy-tale) and aesthetics from chernukha (dark cinema) in order to create a reimagined version of the gangster film. This consideration of the filmic depictions of mafia does not attempt to define the mafia in its truly existing form but seeks to understand how two different experiences of mafia and their interpretations can compare on screen, and how this reveals the tension between resisting and accepting the influence of Hollywood and America on Russian cinema and society.

The paper addresses the thin line between the world of criminals and celebrities. It focuses on questions how role models and their media representation as well as biographies, memoirs, and their film adaptations have created and kept up the image of gangsters, more specifically, the infamy of the two East London criminals, Reggie and Ronnie Kray since the 1950s. After an introduction to aspects of organised crime, mafia, and a few examples of famous gangsters and the role models of the Kray twins from American Al Capone and Frank Sinatra to the English gangster Billy Hill, the paper highlights the life, representation, and image-making methods of the Krays in postwar London until they died in prison (Ronnie in 1995 and Reggie in 2000) as well as their strange, ever-growing popularity and fame even 20 years after their death. The author argues and aims to prove that the systematically built and promoted Kray brand and their legend served as the forerunner to and paved the success of the 2015 American blockbuster under the same title, Legend, and further documentary films and biopics on the Kray twins ever since.

The French film “À bout de souffle” (Acossado, 1959) directed by Jean-Luc Godard represents the transgression of social, political and aesthetic norms. Having begun a new cycle in twentieth-century cinematography, this film questions, explains, and parodies American gangster films. We intend, here, to interpret them on their foundations and aesthetic results.

Abstract There has been substantial scholarly interest in extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs) in translation, especially in audiovisual translation (AVT). However, most scholars have investigated subtitling from English into other languages. Although China has a long tradition of film production, few studies have investigated the subtitling of ECRs from Chinese into English. This article attempts to remedy this by investigating the translation strategies, translation strategy distribution, and fidelity indexes of six subtitled versions of Chinese-language films. We compare our results with Gottlieb’s (2009) results on Danish subtitles, and find that both Chinese and Danish subtitlers hold a target-oriented attitude. We then investigate the share of the strategies in the subtitling of ECRs across different Chinese films and determine that this varies by genre and that the difference in the fidelity index among films of different genres is substantial. The translation of epic films appears to be highly faithful, whereas that of crime and gangster films is much less faithful.

Hana Bi (Fireworks, 1997). Japan. Dir: Takeshi Kitano. Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima, Tetsu Watanabe, Hakuryu Minato-ku. After winning the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, the elegiac and violent yakuza-cop film Hana-Bi (Fireworks) by Japanese director (Beat) Takeshi Kitano drew a full crowd at its preview at the Academy Theatre on a frosty morning in Pusan last October. The full house testified to the power of a Kitano film which now commands a loyal following verging on the fanatical. In fact, his films attract far more viewers than the cult films of Quentin Tarantino such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Kitano's films are characterised by his uncanny ability to create, like in the eye of a storm, a quiet beginning which is suddenly whipped into a ferocious chain of events. However, they have none of the sadness of Hou Hsiao-hsien's landmark gangster...

HANA-BI (Fireworks, 1997). Japan. Dir: Takeshi Kitano. Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi, Susumu Terajima, Tetsu Watanabe, Hakuryu Minato-ku. After winning the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, the elegiac and violent yakuza-cop film Hana-Bi (Fireworks) by Japanese director (Beat) Takeshi Kitano drew a full crowd at its preview at the Academy Theatre on a frosty morning in Pusan last October. The full house testified to the power of a Kitano film which now commands a loyal following verging on the fanatical. In fact, his films attract far more viewers than the cult films of Quentin Tarantino such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Kitano's films are characterised by his uncanny ability to create, like in the eye of a storm, a quiet beginning which is suddenly whipped into a ferocious chain of events. However, they have none of the sadness of Hou Hsiao-hsien's landmark gangster film,...

In the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony and his friends use “prosthetic memories” to anchor their ethnic and criminal identities. Prosthetic memories were theorised by Alison Landsberg in her book Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. She argues that prosthetic memories are memories acquired through the mass media and do not come from a person’s lived experience in any sense (Landsberg 20). In this article, I will outline how The Sopranos television show and its characters interact with prosthetic memories. Extending Christopher Kocela’s work on The Sopranos and white ethnicities, I will show how characters use prosthetic memories to define their ethnicity while the show itself knowingly plays with this to provide comedic and critical commentary about the influence of gangster stereotypes. According to Landsberg, prosthetic memories are powerful memories of historical events or narratives that an individual was not present for. They are typically formed at the "interface between a personal and historical narrative about the past at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum" (2). It is at such a moment that a person can suture themselves into a larger history. Consequently, these memories do not just enhance an individual’s apprehension of a historical event. Rather, they create a deeply felt personal memory of a past event through which they did not live (Landsberg 4). Prosthetic memories are largely made available through the technologies of mass culture such as film, television and experiential places like museums. Their accessibility helps to differentiate them from other cultural strategies for passing on memories to future generations. Other strategies have typically been rooted in the cultural or racial status of an individual (Landsberg 22). In addition, Landsberg asserts that the successfulness of mnemotechnic rituals like the Jewish Passover Seder is dependent on ethnicity (26). Similarly, Walter Benn Michaels concludes that these rituals can only be effective if the individual has “some prior assumption of identity between you and them and this assumption is often racial” (680). Contrastingly, the perpetuation of prosthetic memories through mass media makes them widely accessible across racial lines. According to Landsberg, they are not “naturally- ethnically, racially or biologically- one’s intended inheritance” (26). Prosthetic memories introduce the possibility that memories can be acquired by anyone. The technologies of mass culture make these memories portable and as such, challenges the assumption that memory is “in anyway essential or organically grounded or the private property of a specific ethnic or racial group” (27). In The Sopranos, most characters are third or fourth generation Italian immigrants. Much like for many ‘real’ Italian migrants, time has severed familial connections to their homeland (see Landsberg 49-55). Landsberg suggests that immigrants initially became Americanised in order to escape persecution and being labelled as “other” (51). This meant that ethnically exclusive mnemotechnic rituals were not preserved for subsequent generations of immigrants. In order to sustain an ethnic identity, immigrants (and the characters in The Sopranos) have been forced to turn to more accessible tools like prosthetic memories. Christopher Kocela’s analysis of Italian-Americanness in The Sopranos, argues that characters maintain an Italian American ethnicity while still racially identifying as white. According to Colin Webster “white ethnicity” can be best exemplified through the long tradition of European immigration to America (295). With the influx of immigrants, there was a codification of the idea that “some whites are ‘whiter’ than others” (Webster 297). European working-class immigrants struggled to be afforded the same white “privileges” and membership to the white race. Instead, they were defined as being members of “other” white ethnicities. Roediger argued that such a denial of whiteness pushed European immigrants to insist on their own whiteness by defining themselves against other ethnic minorities like African Americans (8). Between 1890 and 1945, eventual assimilation saw white ethnicities become “fully white” (Roediger 8). Webster argues that: “In this sense, whiteness is nearly always salvageable in a way that black, Mexican, Asian, and Native American ethnicity is not (sic)” (Webster 297). In a similar vein, Kocela suggests that the assimilated characters in The Sopranos benefit from their white racial status while still maintaining an Italian ethnicity. This celebration of ethnic difference by Tony and his friends can serve as a smokescreen for the silent maintenance of whiteness (Kocela 14). Kocela suggests that the show critiques these types of responses that characters have to their ethnicity, stating that "we do not learn from The Sopranos the language of ethnic sons deprived of their Italian godfathers, but the language of racial misrecognition spoken by sons whose lost white fathers were never really their own" (16).Kocela’s article provides a useful discussion about the relationship that characters in The Sopranos have with their ethnicity. This article extends this discussion by showing how prosthetic memories and characters’ understanding of mass media are a crucial element in how such ethnic identities are formed. This will lead to a discussion about how The Sopranos comments on and treats these adopted stereotypes. “What do poor Italian-immigrants have to do with you?”: How Characters Interact with Prosthetic MemoriesCharacters in The Sopranos heavily rely upon stereotypes from gangster films to perform their version of Italian Americanness. A reliance on prosthetic memories from such films leads to the manifestation of violence being intertwined with the characters’ ethnic identities. Brian Faucette has discussed the inherent link between violence and gangster films from the 1930s-60s. He claims that “it was violence that enabled the upward mobility of these figures” (76). It is almost impossible to separate violence from the gangster films referenced in The Sopranos. As such, violence becomes part of the ritualistic ways prosthetic memories are created. This is evident in the pilot episode of The Sopranos when Christopher performs his first hit (kill). In the scene, he shoots rival gang member, Emil, in the back of the head at Satriales Pork Store. Before the hit, the pair are standing close together in front of a pinboard collage of “classic” Italian movie gangsters. As they both walk away in opposite directions the camera pulls out diagonally to follow Christopher. Throughout the duration of the shot, the collage is always placed behind Christopher. Finally, when the pan stops, Christopher is positioned in the foreground, with the collage behind him to the right. The placement of the collage gives it a front row seat to the ensuing murder while serving as a kind of script for it. It is not enough for Christopher to simply kill Emil, rather it is important that it is done in the presence of his idols in order to ensure his enhanced identification with them. Moreover, for Christopher, being an Italian American gangster and violence are inseparable. He must perform acts of extreme violence in order to suture himself into a larger, stereotypical narrative, that equates Italian-Americanness with the mafia. Through Landsberg’s theory, it is possible to see the intertwined relationship between performances of Italian-Americanness and violence. To enact their version of Italian-Americanism, characters follow the script of masculine-violence inherent to gangster films. As well as tools to perform Italian American identities, prosthetic memories can be used by characters to deny their whiteness. Kocela argues that Tony can deny or affirm his whiteness, depending on the situation. According to Kocela, Tony’s economic success is intrinsically linked to his racial status as a white man (16). However, this is not a view shared by characters in the show. In the episode From Where to Eternity Dr. Melfi asks Tony how he justifies his criminal lifestyle: Tony: When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? ... The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn't want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were. We wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that meant something to us: honor, and family, and loyalty. ... Now we weren't educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J.P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was the business, right? The American way.Dr. Melfi: That might all be true. But what do poor Italian immigrants have to do with you and what happens every morning when you step out of bed?Kocela describes Tony’s response as a “textbook recitation of the two-family myth of Italian-American identity in which criminal activities are justified in a need to resist assimilation” (28). It is evident that for Tony, being Italian American is defined by being ethnically different. To admit that whiteness contributes to his economic success would undermine the justification he gives for his criminal lifestyle and his self-perceived status as an Italian American. Despite this, Melfi’s statement rings true. The experience of “poor Italian immigrants” does not affect Tony’s daily lifestyle. Characters in The Sopranos do not face the same oppression and discrimination as first-generation migrants (Kocela 28). After decades of assimilation, Tony and his friends turn to the narratives of discrimination and ethnic difference present in gangster films. This is exemplified through Tony’s identification with Vito Corleone from The Godfather. Vito exemplifies Tony’s notion of Italian Americanism. He was a poor immigrant that turned to criminality to protect the Italian-American community and their way of life. Vito is also connected to Italy in a way that Tony admires. When Paulie asks Tony what his favourite scene from The Godfather is he responds with: Don Ciccio’s Villa, when Vito goes back to Sicily, the crickets, the great old house. Maybe it’s because I’m going over there, ya know? Gangster films and representations of Italian-Americanness often deliberately differentiate Italian families from “regular” white people (D’Acierno 566). According to D’Acierno, gangster narratives often involve two types of Italian families, one that has been left powerless by its assimilation to American culture and another that has resisted this through organised crime (D’Acierno 567). Tony and his friends tap into these narratives in their attempt to create prosthetic memories that differentiate their ethnicity and ultimately draw attention away from the whiteness which silently benefits them.The “inauthenticity” of these prosthetic memories is probably most pronounced in the episode Commendatori when Tony, Christopher and Paulie visit Italy. The trip shatters the expectations that the characters had of their homeland and sheds light on some of their delusions about what it means to be Italian. Paulie expects to love Italy and be greeted with open arms by the locals. Unfortunately, he dislikes it all because it is too foreign for him. At the banquet, Paulie finds the authentic Italian octopus uneatable and instead orders “spaghetti and gravy.” He is also unable to use the bathrooms because he is so used to American toilets. When at a local café he tries to initiate conversation with some local men using broken Italian. Even though they hear him, the group ignores him. Despite all this Paulie, pretends that it was a great trip:Big Pussy: So how was it?Paulie: Fabulous, I felt right at home… I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t been … especially any Italian. The prosthetic memories that defined these characters’ perceptions of Italy are based on the American media’s portrayal of Italy. Commendatori thus exposes the differences between what is “authentically Italian” and the prosthetic memories about Italy generated by American gangster films. By the end of the episode it has become clear that these “inauthentic” prosthetic memories have forged an entirely different, hybrid ethnic identity.“Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes”: How The Sopranos Treats Prosthetic MemoriesIntertextuality is an important way through which the audience can understand how The Sopranos treats prosthetic memories. The prosthetic memories generated by characters in The Sopranos are heavily based on stereotypes of Italian Americans. Papaleo states that the Italian stereotype is “composed of overreactions: after bowing, smiling and being funny, the Italian loses control” (93). Mafia films are crucial in defining the identity of Tony and his friends, and David Pattie suggests that they are a “symbolic framework within which Tony, Paulie, Christopher and Silvio attempt to find meaning and justification for their lives” (137). In a similar way, the audience is invited to use these same films as a frame for watching The Sopranos itself. Mafia stereotypes are one of the dominant ways that depict Italian Americans on screen. According to Larke-Walsh, this has perpetuated the belief that crime and Italian-Americanness are synonymous with each other (226). The show is obsessively referential and relies on the viewer’s knowledge of these films for much of its effect. Pattie describes how such use of intertextuality can be explained: "[there are] two ways of looking at self-referential programs: one in which readings of other media texts can be contained first of all within the film or program in which they occur; and a more covert type of referential work, which relies almost exclusively on the audience’s detailed, constantly-updated cultural intelligence" (137). The Sopranos operates on both levels as references that are simultaneously textual and meta-textual. This is evident through the way the show treats The Godfather films. They are by far the most frequently mentioned ones (Golden 95). According to Chris Messenger, the central link between the two is the acknowledgement that “America itself has been totally colonised by The Godfather” (Messenger 95). The Godfather is an urtext that frames how audiences are invited to view the show. As such, The Sopranos invites the viewer to use the Godfather as a lens to uncover extra layers of meaning. For example, The Sopranos uses the misguided ways in which its characters have taken on stereotypes from The Godfather as a source of humour. The series plays on the fact that characters will allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour. In the pilot episode, Christopher calls “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero to help him dispose of a body. Christopher informs Pussy that it’s his plan to leave the body at a garbage stop to be discovered by the rival Czechoslovakians. Christopher hoped this would emulate the “Luca Brasi situation” from The Godfather and intimidate the Czechoslovakians. When he explains this to Pussy, they have the following exchange. Pussy: The Kolar uncle is gonna find a kid dead on one of his bins and get on our fuckin’ business… no way!Christopher: Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes.Pussy: Luca Brasi… Luca! There are differences Christopher… okay… from the Luca Brasi situation and this. Look, the Kolar’s know a kid is dead, it hardens their position... plus now the cops are lookin’ for a fuckin’ murderer!To members of the audience who are familiar with The Godfather, it immediately becomes clear that Christopher is comically misguided. In the Godfather, Luca Brasi was murdered because he was caught trying to infiltrate a powerful rival organisation. Fish wrapped in his bullet-proof vest were then sent back to the Corleones in order to notify them that their plan had been foiled (“Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes”). The “Luca Brasi situation” was a calculated and strategic move whereas Christopher’s situation amounts to a seemingly random, unauthorised killing. This sequence in The Sopranos uses this comparison for comedic effect and plays on the stereotype that all Italian Americans are mafioso and that all mafia behaviour is interchangeable. The symbolic language of the “Luca Brasi” scene is contrasted with explicit shots of a slumped, lifeless body. These shots are a source of macabre humour. The audience is invited to laugh at the contrast between the subtle, thoughtful nature of the Luca Brasi situation and the brash violence of Christopher’s own predicament. Through this comedic situation, The Sopranos critiques Christopher’s aspiration to be a godfather-esque gangster by showing his incompetence. Christopher’s misreading of the situation is further emphasised by his mistakenly referring to Luca Brasi as “Louis”. After Pussy says: “There are differences… from the Luca Brasi situation and this”, the dialogue pauses and the scene cuts to an immediate close up of Emil’s body falling to the side. This illustrates that part of the joke is that characters are willing to allow prosthetic memories derived from gangster films to dictate their behaviour, no matter how inappropriate. Therefore, Christopher is willing to refer to a scene from the Godfather that fails to account for the context of a situation without even consulting the knowledge of Big Pussy. This leads to a larger critique of the ways in which films like The Godfather are presented as a script for all Italian Americans to follow. Nevertheless, The Sopranos still has a role in perpetuating these same stereotypes. Tomasulo has argued that "despite its use of postclassical generic, narrative aesthetic devices, and its creation by an Italian American, The Sopranos relies heavily on demeaning tropes of ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender" (206). This results in a perpetuation of negative stereotypes about working class Italian Americans that affirm old Hollywood clichés. While The Sopranos has tried to transcend this through complex characterisation, irony and universalisation, Tomasulo asserts that most audiences “take The Sopranos as straight - that is a raw unvarnished anthropology of Americans of Italian descent” (206). The origin of characters’ anti-social personalities seems to stem directly from their ethnicity and their being Italian appears to constitute an explanation for their behaviour. In his article Kocela discusses the complicated relationship that characters have with their white ethnicity. Through an application of Landsberg’s theory it is possible to understand how these ethnicities are initially formed and how they continue to circulate. In response to assimilation, characters in The Sopranos have turned to mass media to generate prosthetic memories of their ethnic heritage. These memories generally originate in classic gangster films. They are used by characters in The Sopranos to deny their whiteness and justify their criminality. The Sopranos itself comments on the complex ways that characters interpret gangster film stereotypes for both comedic and critical commentary. In the epilogue of her book, Landsberg asks: “How can we be sure the politics inspired by prosthetic memories are progressive and ethical?” Prosthetic memories generated by gangster texts are almost inherently problematic. Scholars have criticised the hyper-aggressive masculinity and regressive gender roles that are rampant throughout the genre (Larke-Walsh 226). For Tony and his friends, these problematic gender politics have helped justify their criminal lifestyle and valorised violence as part of ethnic performance. Similarly, these stereotypes are not always circulated critically and are at times perpetuated for audience enjoyment. AcknowledgmentI would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Michelle Phillipov for providing constructive feedback on earlier drafts. References“Commendatori.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. David Chase. Dir. Tim Van Patten. HBO, 2000. DVD.Coppola, Francis, and Mario Puzo. The Godfather. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1972.“D-Girl.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Todd A. Kessler. Dir. Allen Coulter. HBO, 2000. DVD.D'Acierno, Pellegrino. “Cinema Paradiso.” The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts. New York: Garland, 1999. 563-690.Faucette, Brian. "Interrogations of Masculinity: Violence and the Retro-Gangster Cycle of the 60s." Atenea 28.1 (2008): 75-85.“From Where to Eternity.” The Sopranos: The Complete Second Season. Writ. Michael Imperioli. Dir. Henry Bronchtein. HBO, 2000. DVD. Golden, Cameron. "You're Annette Bening? Dreams and Hollywood Subtext in The Sopranos." Lavery, David. Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from H.B.O. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. 91-103.Kocela, Christopher. "Unmade Men: The Sopranos after Whiteness." Postmodern Culture 15.2 (2005). <http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.105/15.2kocela.html>.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memories: The Transformation of American Rememberance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.Messenger, Christopher. Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became Our Gang. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002.Michaels, Walter Ben. "Race into Culture: A Critical Geneology of Cultural Identity." Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 655-85.Larke-Walsh, George. Screening the Mafia: Masculinity, Ethnicity and Mobsters from The Godfather to The Sopranos. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010.Papaleo, Joseph. "Ethnic Images and Ethnic Fate: The Media Image of Italian Americans." Ethnic Images in American Film and Television (1978): 44-95.Pattie, David. "Mobbed Up: The Sopranos and the Modern Gangster Film." Lavery, David. This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos. New York: Wallflower Press, 2002. 137-152.Roediger, D.R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 2007. Thorburn, D. "The Sopranos." In The Essential H.B.O Reader, eds. G. Edgerton and J. Jones. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008. 61-70.Tomasulo, Frank. "The Guinea as Tragic Hero: The Complex Representation of Italian Americans." In The Essential Sopranos Reader, eds. David Lavery, Douglas Howard, and Paul Levinson. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 196-207.“The Sopranos.” The Sopranos: The Complete First Season. Writ. David Chase. Dir. David Chase. HBO, 1999. DVD. “Walk like a Man.” The Sopranos: The Complete Sixth Season. Writ. Terence Winter. Dir. Terence Winter. HBO, 2007. DVD. Webster, Colin. "Marginalized White Ethnicity, Race and Crime." Theoretical Criminology 12 (2008): 293-312.

“Street culture” is often considered a response to structural factors. However, the relationship between culture and structure has rarely been empirically analyzed. This article analyzes the role of three media representations of American street culture and gangsters—two films and the music of a rap artist—in the street culture of a disadvantaged part of Copenhagen. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article demonstrates that these media representations are highly valuable to and influential among young men because of their perceived similarity between their intersectional structural positions and those represented in the media. Thus, the article illuminates the interaction between structural and cultural factors in street culture. It further offers a local explanation of the scarcely studied phenomenon of the influence of mass media on street culture, and a novel, media-based, local explanation of global similarities in different street cultures.

The research is a pragmatic study on positive politeness strategies employed by the main characters in “ Greatest Showman” and “Chappie” films in the context of differences certain the century society. the researcher use Brown and Levinson’s theory of positive politeness theory. Politeness is the way of self strategies in communication to others, in order to received their meanings well. The objectives of this research are to find out the types of positive politeness strategies by main character in the setting 19th Century society (Greatest Showman film) and 21st Century setting society (Chappie film) and to find out factors affecting main character to choice that strategies. The researcher used a qualitative method since the data engaged are displayed in the form of strings of words. The result shows that Phineas in “Greatest Showman” that can be conclude in 19th century society, generally showed social class, kept family relation well, and respected for abnormal people. Diffrent with Deon in “Chappie” film that can be conclude in 21st century society, people concern with technology development, a lot of gangster who do the crime, and people communicate only in certain interests.Keywords: Pragmatics, Politeness Strategy, Movie Script

Since its first performance in or around 1606, Shakespeare's Macbeth has been the target of a vast number of theatrical and cinematographic reproductions. This paper claims that, rather than giving its direct rereading, Coppola's The Godfather Trilogy applies the tragic mechanism of Macbeth and thus diverges from other types of gangster films. This is shown through the discussion of the consequences of sin and the problem of free will with respect to Macbeth, and the protagonist of the Godfather-saga, Michael Corleone. In both pieces, sin is interpreted as a work of art, which through its directive inspiration provides complete artistic freedom to the protagonists, yet at the same time heavily determines their action through that very work of art itself. Resulting from the differences of the two genres, in Macbeth's case the dramatic portrayal of sin condenses into a single act of murder, while in the epic saga of Michael it is broken up into smaller episodes, manifesting themselves in different deeds, which one by one echo various aspects of Macbeth's predicament. However, the two protagonists also create their respective worlds which enclose them more and more; their attempt to escape will prove to be an illusion, and what is most valuable for their lives is destroyed through their own actions.

<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; color: black;">O filme "The Godfather" (intitulado "O padrinho", em Portugal, e "O poderoso chefão", no Brasil) é um filme de "gangsters", de uma família mafiosa, de um poder constituído fora da lei. A conquista, a manutenção e a defesa do poder é feita com recurso à violência, ao assassinato inclusive. A tese que proponho expor e defender neste artigo é que o poder da família Corleone não é um poder despótico, mas um poder altamente controlado, regulamentado por códigos de honra, de parentesco, de amizade. Isso por um lado, e por outro lado, que o exercício desse poder tem uma componente simbólica fortíssima, uma componente litúrgica como irei demonstrar.</span></p>

Books reviewed: The Philippines J. Neil C. Garcia,Philippine Gay Culture: the Last 30 Years. Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM.Filomeno Aguilar, Clash of Spirits—the History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island. China Benjamin Yang, Deng: a Political Biography.Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle. Two Worlds of Factory Women.Linda Benson and Ingvar Svanberg, China's Last Nomads: the History and Culture of China's Kazaks. Japan, Korea Tessa Morris‐Suzuki, Re‐inventing Japan: time, Space, Nation.David Myers and Kotaku Ishido (eds), Japan at the Crossroads. Southeast Asia Carl A. Trocki (ed), Gangsters, Democracy, and the State in Southeast Asia.Linda Conner, Patsy Asch and Timothy Asch, Films: A Balinese Trance Séance(30 mins). Jero on Jero(16 mins). The Medium is the Masseuse(31 mins). Jero Tapakan(26 mins).Book: Jero Tapakan: Balinese Healer, An Ethnographic Film Monograph(2nd edition).

Además de las transposiciones y citas borgeanas en filmes de Torre Nilsson, Saura, Mick Jagger, Scorsese, Godard, Christensen, Bertolucci, Hugo Santiago, Chabrol, Bielinsky, Mugica, Cozarinsky, Javier Torre, Bauer, Narcisa Hirsch o Desanzo; encontramos las opiniones de Borges como crítico cinematográfico sobre Groucho Marx, Eisenstein, Ford, Soffici, Orson Welles, Hitchcock, el doblaje, el cine argentino; su preferencia por los westerns y por el cine de gangsters del barroco vienés Von Sternberg -acaso parientes hollywoodenses de sus cuchilleros porteños-, y su labor como guionista. Defensor del cine clásico antes que del “nuevo cine” que se interesó en él, Borges hizo cine desde su literatura. El modelo, gramática o sistema narrativo del cine (¿magia?) que ordena el caos en el encuadre y el montaje atraviesan su obra, tan inclinada también por mundos proyectados y espejismos reveladores.

Susanne Bier and David Farr’s 2016 television adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Night Manager (“Manager”) indexes the resilience of traditional Christian misogyny in contemporary British-American media. In the first episode of the series, Sophie (Aure Atika)’s partner Freddie Hamid (David Avery) brutally beats her. In the subsequent scene, despite her scars, Sophie has a sex scene with the eponymous night manager Pine (Tom Hiddlestone). Sophie’s eye socket and the left side of her face bear fresh bruises and wounds throughout the sex scene. And in the sixth and final episode, Pine and Jed (Elizabeth Debicki) have sex after she has been tortured at length by her partner Roper’s (Hugh Laurie) henchman, at Roper’s request. Jed’s neck, face, and arms bear bruises from the torture.These sex scenes function as a space of revelation. I interpret the women’s wounds and injuries alongside a feminist-critical tradition of reading noir on screen. Inaugurated by Ann Kaplan’s 1978 Women in Film Noir, many feminist commentators have since made the claim that women in noir achieve a peculiar significance, and their key scenes a subversive meaning; “in excess of” their punitive treatment within the narrative (Kaplan 5; Harvey 31; Tasker Working Girls 117). My reading emphasizes a tension between Manager’s patriarchal narrative framing and these two sex scenes that I argue disrupt and subvert the former.That Sophie and Jed are brutalised by their partners does not tell us much: it is a routine expectation in British-American film and television that “bad guys” are tough on “their” chicks. It is only after these violent encounters with their partners, when the women share “romantic” moments with Pine, that the text’s patriarchal entitlement is laid bare (“revelation” stems from Late Latin revelare to “lay bare”). Forgetting about their cuts, injuries and bruises, they desire Pine, remove their clothes, and are stimulated, stimulating, pleasuring, and pleasured. Director Bier and writer Farr assume that a 2016 British and American audience will (i) find these encounters between Sophie and Pine, and Pine and Jed, to be romantic and tender; and also (ii) find Pine’s behavior consistent with that of a “savior”. These expectations regarding audience complicity are truly revelatory.Sophie and Jed’s wounds constitute a space of revelation: the wounds are in excess of, and spill over, the patriarchal narrative framing. Their wounds indicate that the narrative has approached a moment of excessive patriarchal entitlement—emphasising extreme power imbalances between Pine and the women—and break through the narrative framing and encourage feminist enquiry. I use feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s theory of consent to argue that, given this blatant power inequity, it could be interpreted the characters have different perspectives of the sexual act and it is questionable whether the women are in fact consenting (182).Critical ReceptionAcademic engagement with John le Carré’s well-respected espionage novels continues to emerge, including the books of Myron Aronoff, Tony Barley, Matthew Bruccoli and Judith Baughman, John Cobbs, David Monaghan, Peter Lewis and Peter Wolfe. There are a small number of academic commentaries exploring the screen adaptations of his novels, including Eric Morgan’s “Whores and Angels” and Geraint D’Arcy’s “Essentially, Another Man’s Woman”. Unfortunately, there are almost no academic commentaries on Manager, with the exception of Gunhild Agger’s “Geopolitical Location and Plot in The Night Manager”, and none that focus on the handling of gender themes within it.However, there are abundant mainstream media articles and reviews of Manager. I randomly selected seven of these articles and reviews in order to gauge the response to these sex scenes within a 2016 British-American media community. I looked at articles and reviews by Hal Boedeker, Caitlin Flynn, Tim Goodman, Jeff Jensen, Tom Lamont, Jasper Rees, and Claire Webb. None of the articles mention the theme of “gender” or note the gendered violence in the series. The reviews are complicit with the patriarchal narrative framing, and introduce Sophie and Jed in terms of their physical appearances and in their relation to principal male characters. “Beautiful and pale” Jed is “girlfriend of Bogeyman arms dealer” (Jensen), and is also referred to as “Roper’s long-legged trophy girlfriend” (Rees). Sophie, in a “sultry brunette corner” is a “tempting, tragic damsel-in-distress” (Rees) and “arouses Pine” (Jensen). However, reviewers describe the character Burr (who is male in the novel but played by Olivia Colman in the series) with greater dignity and detail. Introducing the character Sophie (Aure Atika), reviewer Tom Goodman does not refer to her by character or actress name despite the fact he introduces male characters by both. Instead, Sophie is a “beautiful connected woman” and is subsequently referred to as “the woman” (Goodman). This anonymity of Sophie as character, and Atika as actor, indexes the Christian misogyny in operation here: in Genesis, Adam only names Eve after the fall of man (New International Version, Gen. 3:20). Goodman’s textual erasure supports Sophie’s vulnerability and expendability within the narrative logic. Indeed, the reviews recapitulate stock noir themes, suggesting that the women are seductively manipulative: Goodman implies that both Bier and Debicki both deploy beauty so as to distract or beguile (Goodman), and Jensen notes that the women are “sultry with danger” (Jensen).Commentators and reviewers have likened Manager, with good reason, to screen adaptations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. This is a useful comparison for the purposes of clarifying my own analytical approach. Lisa Funnell and Klaus Dodds’s Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond, endorse a feminist geopolitical sensibility that audits which bodies are vulnerable, and which are disposable (14). Bond, like Manager’s Pine, is fundamentally privileged and invulnerable (14). Their account of Bond also describes Pine: “white, cis-gender, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied… British, attended Cambridge… he can move, act, and perform; gain access to places, spaces and resources” (1). Sophie’s vulnerability counterpoints Pine’s privilege. Against Pine’s athletic form and blond features stands the “foreign” Sophie, iterated through an emphasis on her dark features, silk dresses (that reference kaftans), and accented language (she delivers English language lines with a strong accent and discloses to Pine that she has tried to “Anglicise” her identity and has changed name). Sophie’s social and financial precarity seems behind her decision to become the mistress of violent gangster Freddie Hamid (in “Episode One” Sophie explains that Hamid “owns her”). By the end of this episode Hamid has violently beaten her then later murdered her. And even though the character Jed is white and American, it is implied that financial necessity is behind her choice of Richard Roper as partner. Jed is violently tortured and beaten in “Episode Six”.Funnell and Dodds also note Bond’s capacity to sexually satisfy women as a key dimension of his hegemonic masculinity (1). In Manager, the spectator is presumed complicit with the narrative framing and is expected to uncritically accept Pine’s extreme desirability to women. The assumption of Pine’s sexiness and sexual competency together constitute his entitlement, made clear in sex scenes between him and Sophie, and him and Jed. These sex scenes follow events of gendered violence and I raise the possibility that they also constitute instances of gendered violence.Noir Feminine ArchetypesReviewers have pointed out that Manager engages with the noir tradition (Jensen). Sophie and Jed are both “fallen” women, reflecting the Christian heritage of the noir tradition, though incarnate different noir archetypes (Allen 6). Mysterious and seductive Sophie emerges as a femme fatale in the first episode: the dark and seductive girlfriend of gangster Freddie Hamid, Sophie entrusts Pine with delicate and dangerous information, leading him into a dark world. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, the snake convinces Eve that the fruit does not bring death but instead knowledge. Eve wishes to share this knowledge with her partner “but keep the odds of knowledge in my power / without co-partner?” ultimately precipitating the fall of Adam and mankind (Milton 818). Sophie shares information regarding Hamid and Roper’s illegal arms deal with Pine. There are two transgressions on her part: she shares her partner’s confidential information with Pine and then has an affair with him. Hamid murders Sophie for the betrayals. However, Sophie’s murder does not erase her narrative significance: the event motivates protagonist Pine in his chief quest to ‘bring Roper down’, and as Boedeker concurs, the narrative’s action is “driven by this event”. Indeed, Yvonne Tasker notes the dual function of the femme fatale: she is both “an archetype which suggests an equation between female sexuality, death and danger” and also “functions as the vibrant centre of the narrative” (Tasker 117).Pine’s later love interest Jed is an example of the more complicated “good-bad girl” noir type, as Andrew Spicer has usefully coined it (92). The “good-bad girl” occupies a morally ambiguous space between the (dangerously sexy) femme fatale and (fundamentally decent) “girl-next-door” (Spicer 92). Both “good” and “bad”, Jed is unmarried but living with villain Roper, whom she has presumably selected out of economic necessity; she is a mother, but this does not bestow her with maternal legitimacy as she keeps her son a secret and is physically remote from him. Jed finds “real love” with Pine and betrays Roper in assisting Pine’s espionage plot. Roper’s henchman punishes Jed for the betrayal (in the torture scene Roper laments “I saw how you looked at him last night”; “Episode 6”).Despite the routine sexism and punitive thrust of the noir narrative, the women’s “romantic” sex scenes with Pine are laden with subversive significance. In her analysis of women in noir, Sylvia Harvey argues:Despite the ritual punishment of acts of transgression, the vitality with which these acts are endowed produces an excess of meaning which cannot finally be contained. Narrative resolutions cannot recuperate their subversive significance. (31)The visibility of Sophie and Jed’s wounds throughout their respective sex scenes with Pine signals an excessive patriarchal entitlement that disrupts the narrative logic and invites us to question the women’s perspectives. My analysis of the scenes is informed by feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon’s argument that under unequal power relations consent is fraught, if not impossible (180). MacKinnon argues that women’s beliefs and reactions are shaped by power inequality, including the threat of male violence, economic dependence, and need (175).Analysis of Sophie and Pine’s InteractionsI first analyse Sophie’s dialogue because I seek to demonstrate that there is a communication breakdown in play: Sophie is asking Pine for help and safety while Pine thinks she is seducing him. Sophie’s verbal exchanges with Pine can be read in two different ways: (i) according to the patriarchal narrative framing (the spectator is positioned alongside Pine, seeing Sophie as scopophilic object); or (ii) from a feminist perspective that takes Sophie’s situation and perspective into account (Mulvey 835-36). Sophie’s language is legible as flirtation. If we are uncritically complicit with the narrative framing, Sophie is usually trying to arrange time alone with Pine because she desires him. However, if we emphasise Sophie’s perspective, she is asking for privacy, discretion, and help to stay alive (and to save the lives of others too, given that she is foiling an arms deal). Catharine MacKinnon’s observation that “men are systematically conditioned not even to notice what women want” plays out elegantly in the scenes between Pine and Sophie (181). Pine manages to discern that Sophie needs some sort of help, but shows no regard for her perspective or the significant power inequality between the two of them. From their earliest interaction in “Episode One” Sophie addresses Pine in a flirtatious way. In an audacious request, although it is ‘below’ his duties as manager she insists he make her a coffee and cheekily demands he sit with her while she drinks it. Their interaction is a standard flirtatious tête-à-tête, entailing the playful query “what do you [Pine] know of me?” Sophie begs Pine to copy some documents for her in his office even though he points out that his colleague performs such duties. Sophie suggestively demands “I would prefer to use your office”. It seems that by insisting on time alone with him, Sophie’s goal is that Pine does the task, rather than the task be done per se. However, it promptly transpires that Sophie sought a private location in order to share classified information with him, having noted at an earlier date Pine’s friendship with a British diplomat. She asks him to “hold onto” the documents “in case something happens to her”.Pine nonetheless passes on these classified documents to this contact.Sophie and Pine’s next interaction follows a similar pattern: she rings him from her hotel room and asks him to bring her a scotch. He suggests alternative ways she can procure a drink, yet she confirms the real object of her desire (“I want you”). Pine smirks as he approaches her room. Sophie’s declaration appears as (i) a desirous statement and invitation to come to her room for sex but it is in fact (ii) a demand that Pine (specifically) comes to her room, because she wants to know with whom he shared the documents and to reveal to him the injuries she received as a punishment for his leak.After realising the danger he has put her in, Pine takes her to a remote house to secure her safety. Once inside, she implores “why do you sit so far away?” which sounds like a request for closeness, perhaps even that he touch her. Yet the extent of her desired proximity, and the nature of the touch she requests, can be interpreted in (at least) two ways. Certainly, Pine believes that she desires sexual intercourse with him. The spectator is meant to interpret this request along those lines by virtue of Atika’s seductive delivery. Pine explains that he sits with distance “out of respect” and Sophie teases “is that why you came all the way here, to respect me?” This remark reveals Sophie’s assumption that Pine’s assistance has been transactional (help in exchange for sex) and the content indicates the kind of sex she assumes he expects (“disrespectful” sex, or at least sex that playfully skirts the boundaries of respect). In a declaration that stands up as a positive affirmation of consent under British and American law, Sophie announces: “I want one of your many selves to sleep with me tonight.”From a freshly bruised eye socket, Sophie lovingly stares at Pine. Extra-diegetic strings instruct us that the moment is romantic. Pine strokes the (unbruised side) side of her face. Could her question “why do you sit so far away?” have been a request that he sit near her, place an arm around her shoulder, hold her hand, stroke her forehead, perhaps even tend to her wounds? Might the request that he “sleep with [her] tonight” have been a request that he sleep in the cottage, albeit on the floor?Sophie and Pine are subsequently displayed naked, limbs entangled. A new shot, a close-up of the right side of her face, displays a scab atop her eyebrow, a deeply bruised eye socket, further bruises down her cheeks, and a split lip. The muscular, broad Pine is atop Sophie and thrusting; Sophie’s split lip smiles in ecstasy and gratitude. A post-coital shot follows: she stares lovingly down at him with her facial injuries on full display, her dark eyes stare into his lucid green. Pine asks Sophie’s “real name”. Samira recounts that she changed her name to Sophie in order to “be more Western”. The power inequality is manifest on gendered, cultural, social, and physical lines: in order to advance her social position, Samira has sought to Anglicise herself and partnered with a violent (though influential) criminal (who has recently brutalised her). Her life is in danger, she is (depicted as) dark and foreign and ostensibly has no social or support network (is isolated enough to appeal to a hotel manager for help). Meanwhile, Pine is Western university-educated, a spectacle of white male athletic privilege, and has elite connections with British intelligence.Catharine MacKinnnon argues that consent is only a meaningful option if the parties are equally powerful (174). Sophie’s extreme vulnerability renders their situations patently unequal. As MacKinnon argues “when perspective is bound up with situation, and [that] situation is unequal, whether or not a contested interaction is authoritatively considered rape comes down to whose meaning wins” (182). I do not argue that Pine rapes Sophie per se. However, the revealing of Sophie’s injuries efficiently articulates the power inequality in their situations and thus problematises a straightforward assumption of her consent. MacKinnon’s argues that rape occurs “somewhere between” the following three factors (182). First, “what the woman actually wanted” (Sophie wanted to save the lives of others (by foiling an arms deal) and not die for the breach). Second, “what she was able to express about what she wanted” (class/gender/race power dynamics may have frustrated Sophie’s ability to articulate her needs and might have motivated her sexually suggestive tenor). Third, “what the man comprehended she wanted” (Pine assumes that Sophie, like all women, sexually desire him).Analysis of Jed and Pine’s InteractionsThe injustice of Pine and Sophie’s sexual encounter finds its counterpart in Pine’s sexual encounter with Jed in the final episode of the series (“Episode Six”). Roper discovers that Jed has given a third party (Pine and his colleagues) access to his private (incriminating) files. Roper instructs his henchman to torture Jed until she identifies this third party. The henchman holds Jed by the back of her neck and dunks her head repeatedly into bathwater. The camera reveals deep bruises on her arms. Jed refuses to identify her beloved (Pine) as the ‘rat’, yet the astute Roper nevertheless surmises “you must care deeply about the person you are protecting”.Alas, the dominant narrative must go on: Roper and Pine attend to an arms deal; the deal fails because Pine has set Roper up to appear as though he has robbed the buyers (and so on). Burr and Pine’s mission to “bring down” Roper has been completed. I keep wondering what Roper’s henchman has been doing to Jed during this “men’s business”. Alas, after Pine has completed the job, we encounter Jed again. She is in bed, her limbs entangled with Pine’s. The camera positioning and shot sequencing are almost identical to the sex scene between Pine and Sophie in “Episode One”. A medium close-up from the left reveals Pine thrusting atop Jed. Through pale moonlight the viewer discerns injures on Jed’s face and chin.The morning after this (brief) sex scene, Pine and Jed discuss her imminent departure (“home” to New York, to be reunited with her son). Debicki’s performance is tremendously tender: her lip trembles, her voice shakes as she swallows tears. Jed is sad because she is bidding Pine farewell, and, as she verbalises to Pine, she is nervous about whether her son will “recognise her”. Does Jed’s torture also give her grounds to weep and tremble? Ever a gentleman, Pine clasps her hand, and while marching her to her taxi, we see more bruises atop her left arm.I am also not arguing that Pine raped Jed. Yet given what Jed had endured earlier that day – torture by drowning, as commissioned and witnessed by her own partner – was sexual intercourse what she desired or needed? The visibility of Jed’s injuries throughout the sex scene marks an apotheosis of patriarchal entitlement. Might a fraternal or (even remedial) touch have been Pine’s first priority? Does Jed need a hug? Does she need ice? Had Pine been educated or socialised in a different tradition, one remotely attuned to what anyone might need after a disastrously traumatic and violent event, he might not have found penetrative sex an appropriate remedy. Pine’s absolute security in his own sexual desirability meant that he found the activity suitable, yet her injuries break my blind faith in his sexiness. I wish to raise the possibility that intercourse after this event might have compounded the violent events Jed endured that day. Contrary to the narrative’s implication, penetrative intercourse (even with Tom Hiddleston) might not heal Sophie or Jed’s wounds.ConclusionI am not a humourless feminist immune to the entertaining (and often entertainingly preposterous) dimensions of the spy and action genre. In fact, I enthusiastically await subsequent screen adaptations of le Carré’s work and the next Bond instalment. This is not a call to “cancel” a genre, text, director or writer. Biblically, a “revelation” has always instructed humans on how to live in this life. These sex scenes do not merely lay bare extreme patriarchal entitlement but might instruct directors and writers working within the genre to keep wounds, and wounded women, out of their sex scenes. I think that is a modest request. ReferencesAgger, Gunhild. “Geopolitical Location and Plot in The Night Manager.” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 7 (2017): 27-42.Allen, Virginia. The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1983.Aronoff, Myron. The Spy Novels of John le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.Barley, Tony. Taking Sides: The Fiction of John le Carré. Philadelphia: Open U, 1986.Boedeker, Hal. “‘Night Manager’: Check in for Tom Hiddleston.” Orlando Sentinel, 16 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/tv-guy/os-night-manager-check-in-for-tom-hiddleston-20160416-story.html>.Bruccoli, Matthew, and Judith Baughman. Conversations with John le Carré. Oxford: U of Mississippi P, 2004.Cobbs, John. Understanding John le Carré. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1998.D’arcy, Geraint. “‘Essentially, Another Man’s Woman’: Information and Gender in the Novel and Adaptations of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Adaptation 7.3 (2014): 275-90.Funnell, Lisa, and Klaus Dodds. Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.Flynn, Caitlin. “Who Is Sophie on ‘The Night Manager’? Aure Atika’s Character Will Drive the Thriller.” Bustle, 20 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.bustle.com/articles/155498-who-is-sophie-on-the-night-manager-aure-atikas-character-will-drive-the-thriller>. Goodman, Tim. “Critic's Notebook: 'The Night Manager' Glosses over Its Flaws with Beauty and Talent.” Hollywood Reporter, 28 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bastard-machine/critics-notebook-night-manager-glosses-888648>.Harvey, Sylvia. “Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1980. 30-38.Jackson, Emily. “Catharine MacKinnon and Feminist Jurisprudence: A Critical Appraisal.” Journal of Law and Society 19.2 (1992): 195-213.Jensen, Jeff. “‘The Night Manager’: EW Review.” Entertainment Weekly, 14 Apr. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://ew.com/article/2016/04/14/the-night-manager-review/>. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Introduction.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: British Film Institute, 1980. 1-5.Lamont, Tom. “Elizabeth Debicki: ‘We Fought about How Sexy I Should Be’.” The Guardian, 8 Oct. 2016. 7 June 2020 <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/08/elizabeth-debicki-fought-a-lot-how-sexy-should-be-the-night-manager>. Lewis, Peter. John le Carré. New York: Ungar, 1985.MacKinnon, Catharine. Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Eds. Mary Waldrep and Susan Rattiner. United States: Dover Publications, 2005.Monaghan, David. The Novels of John le Carré: The Art of Survival. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.———. Smiley’s Circus: A Guide to the Secret World of John le Carré. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986.Morgan, Eric. “Whores and Angels of Our Striving Selves: The Cold War Films of John le Carré, Then and Now.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 36.1 (2016): 88-103.Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 833-44.The Night Manager. Dir. S. Bier. Screenplay D. Farr. UK/USA: BBC and AMC, 2016.Rees, Jasper. “The Night Manager, Episode 1: Brilliant Event Drama.” The Telegraph, 20 Apr. 2016. 2 June 2020 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2016/02/19/the-night-manager-episode-1-event-drama-of-the-highest-calibre/>.Scheppele, Kim. “The Reasonable Woman.” The Responsive Community, Rights and Responsibilities 1.4 (1991): 36–47.Tasker, Yvonne. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. London: Routledge, 1998.———. “Women in Film Noir.” A Companion to Film Noir. Eds. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. 353-68.Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Secret Agents in Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984.Webb, Claire. “Where to Find the Plush Hotels and Lush Locations in The Night Manager”. Radio Times, 21 Feb. 2016. 2 June 2020 <http://www.radiotimes.com/ news/2016-02-21/where-to-find-the-plush-hotels-and-lush-locations-inthe-night-manager>.Wolfe, Peter. Corridors of Deceit: The World of John le Carré. Madison, WI: Popular P, 1987.

This paper explores South African hip-hop activist Emile YX?'s work to suggest that he presents an alternative take on mainstream US and South African hip-hop. While it is arguable that a great deal of mainstream hip-hop is commercially co-opted, it is clear that a significant amount of US hip-hop (by Angel Haze or Talib Kweli, for example) and hip-hop beyond the US (by Positive Black Soul, Godessa, Black Noise or Prophets of da City, for example) present alternatives to its co-option. Emile YX? pushes for an alternative to mainstream hip-hop's aesthetics and politics. Foregoing what Prophets of da City call “mindless topics” (Prophets of da City “Cape Crusader”), he employs hip-hop to engage audiences critically about social and political issues, including language and racial identity politics. Significantly, he embraces AfriKaaps, which is a challenge to the hegemonic speech variety of Afrikaans. From Emile's perspective, AfriKaaps preceded Afrikaans because it was spoken by slaves during the Cape colonial era and was later culturally appropriated by Afrikaner Nationalists in the apartheid era to construct white, Afrikaner identity as pure and bounded. AfriKaaps in hip-hop therefore presents an alternative to mainstream US-centric hip-hop in South Africa (via AKA or Cassper Nyovest, for example) as well as Afrikaner Nationalist representations of Afrikaans and race by promoting multilingual hip-hop aesthetics, which was initially advanced by Prophets of da City in the early '90s.Pursuing Alternative TrajectoriesEmile YX?, a former school teacher, started out with the Black Consciousness-aligned hip-hop crew, Black Noise, as a b-boy in the late 1980s before becoming an MC. Black Noise went through a number of iterations, eventually being led by YX? (aka Emile Jansen) after he persuaded the crew not to pursue a mainstream record deal in favour of plotting a career path as independent artists. The crew’s strategy has been to fund the production and distribution of their albums independently and to combine their work as recording and performing artists with their activism. They therefore arranged community workshops at schools and, initially, their local library in the township, Grassy Park, before touring nationally and internationally. By the late 1990s, Jansen established an NGO, Heal the Hood, in order to facilitate collaborative projects with European and South African partners. These partnerships, not only allowed Black Noise crew members to continue working as hip-hip activists, but also created a network through which they could distribute their music and secure further bookings for performances locally and internationally.Jansen’s solo work continued along this trajectory and he has gone on to work on collaborative projects, such as the hip-hop theatre show Afrikaaps, which looks critically at the history of Afrikaans and identity politics, and Mixed Mense, a b-boy show that celebrates African dance traditions and performed at One Mic Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2014 (48 Hours). This artist’s decision not to pursue a mainstream record deal in the early 1990s probably saved Black Noise from being a short-lived pop sensation in favour of pursuing a route that ensured that Cape hip-hop retained its alternative, Black Consciousness-inspired subcultural edge.The activism of Black Noise and Heal the Hood is an example of activists’ efforts to employ hip-hop as a means of engaging youth critically about social and political issues (Haupt, Stealing Empire 158-165). Hence, despite arguments that the seeds for subcultures’ commercial co-option lie in the fact that they speak through commodities (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45), there is evidence of agency despite the global reach of US cultural imperialism. H. Samy Alim’s concept of translocal style communities is useful in this regard. The concept focuses on the “transportability of mobile matrices – sets of styles, aesthetics, knowledges, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities” (Alim 104-105). Alim makes the case for agency when he contends, “Although global style communities may indeed grow out of particular sociohistoric originating moments, or moments in which cultural agents take on the project of creating ‘an origin’ (in this case, Afrodiasporic youth in the United States in the 1970s), it is important to note that a global style community is far from a threatening, homogenizing force” (Alim 107).Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s concepts of ethnoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes and mediascapes, Alim argues that the “persistent dialectical interplay between the local and the global gives rise to the creative linguistic styles that are central to the formation of translocal style communities, and leads into theorizing about glocal stylizations and style as glocal distinctiveness” (Appadurai; Alim 107). His view of globalisation thus accommodates considerations of the extent to which subjects on both the local and global levels are able to exercise agency to produce new or alternative meanings and stylistic practices.Hip-Hop's Translanguaging Challenge to HegemonyJansen’s “Mix en Meng It Op” [“Mix and Blend It / Mix It Up”] offers an example of translocal style by employing translanguaging, code mixing and codeswitching practices. The song’s first verse speaks to the politics of race and language by challenging apartheid-era thinking about purity and mixing:In South Africa is ek coloured and African means black raceFace it, all mense kom van Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionEk’s siek en sat van all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s om te expose onse behoort aan een rasHou vas, ras is las, watch hoe ons die bubble barsPlus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir daai potjie want ons wietie wattie mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSoe hulle moet gemix het om daai clicks to employ(Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; my emphasis)[In South Africa I am coloured and African means black raceFace it, all people come from Africa in the first placeErase all trace of race and our tribal divisionI’m sick and tired of all our land’s racist decisionsMy mission’s to expose the fact that we belong top one raceHold on, race is a burden, watch as we burst the bubble Plus the mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sirStir that pot because we don’t know what the mixtures wereThis illusion of race and tribe is rotten to the coreWhat’s more the lie of purity shouldn’t exist anymoreLook at Shaka Zulu, who mixed all those tribes togetherMixed conquered tribes now Amazulu foreverHave you ever considered all this mixture before?Xhosa comes from Khoe khoe, do you wanna know more?Xhosa means angry looking man in Khoe KhoeSo they must have mixed to employ those clicks]The MC does more than codeswitch or code mix in this verse. The syntax switches from that of English to Afrikaans interchangeably and he is doing more than merely borrowing words and phrases from one language and incorporating it into the other language. In certain instances, he opts to pronounce certain English words and phrases as if they were Afrikaans (for example, “My” and “land’s”). Suresh Canagarajah explains that codeswitching was traditionally “distinguished from code mixing” because it was assumed that codeswitching required “bilingual competence” in order to “switch between [the languages] in fairly contextually appropriate ways with rhetorical and social significance”, while code mixing merely involved “borrowings which are appropriated into one’s language so that using them doesn't require bilingual competence” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, he argues that both of these translingual practices do not require “full or perfect competence” in the languages being mixed and that “these models of hybridity can be socially and rhetorically significant” (Canagarajah, Translingual Practice 10). However, the artist is clearly competent in both English and Afrikaans; in fact, he is also departing from the hegemonic speech varieties of English and Afrikaans in attempts to affirm black modes of speech, which have been negated during apartheid (cf. Haupt “Black Thing”).What the artist seems to be doing is closer to translanguaging, which Canagarajah defines as “the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, treating the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). The mix or blend of English and Afrikaans syntax become integrated, thereby performing the very point that Jansen makes about what he calls “the lie of purity” by asserting that the “mixture that mixed here is not fixed, sir” (Emile XY? “Mix en Meng It Op”). This approach is significant because Canagarajah points out that while research shows that translanguaging is “a naturally occurring phenomenon”, it “occurs surreptitiously behind the backs of the teachers in classes that proscribe language mixing” (Canagarajah, “Codemeshing in Academic Writing” 401). Jansen’s performance of translanguaging and challenge to notions of linguistic and racial purity should be read in relation to South Africa’s history of racial segregation during apartheid. Remixing Race/ism and Notions of PurityLegislated apartheid relied on biologically essentialist understandings of race as bounded and fixed and, hence, the categories black and white were treated as polar opposites with those classified as coloured being seen as racially mixed and, therefore, defiled – marked with the shame of miscegenation (Erasmus 16; Haupt, “Black Thing” 176-178). Apart from the negative political and economic consequences of being classified as either black or coloured by the apartheid state (Salo 363; McDonald 11), the internalisation of processes of racial interpellation was arguably damaging to the psyche of black subjects (in the broad inclusive sense) (cf. Fanon; Du Bois). The work of early hip-hop artists like Black Noise and Prophets of da City (POC) was therefore crucial to pointing to alternative modes of speech and self-conception for young people of colour – regardless of whether they self-identified as black or coloured. In the early 1990s, POC lead the way by embracing black modes of speech that employed codeswitching, code mixing and translanguaging as a precursor to the emergence of music genres, such as kwaito, which mixed urban black speech varieties with elements of house music and hip-hop. POC called their performances of Cape Flats speech varieties of English and Afrikaans gamtaal [gam language], which is an appropriation of the term gam, a reference to the curse of Ham and justifications for slavery (Adhikari 95; Haupt Stealing Empire 237). POC’s appropriation of the term gam in celebration of Cape Flats speech varieties challenge the shame attached to coloured identity and the linguistic practices of subjects classified as coloured. On a track called “Gamtaal” off Phunk Phlow, the crew samples an assortment of recordings from Cape Flats speech communities and capture ordinary people speaking in public and domestic spaces (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”). In one audio snippet we hear an older woman saying apologetically, “Onse praatie suiwer Afrikaan nie. Onse praat kombius Afrikaans” (Prophets of da City “Gamtaal”).It is this shame for black modes of speech that POC challenges on this celebratory track and Jansen takes this further by both making an argument against notions of racial and linguistic purity and performing an example of translanguaging. This is important in light of research that suggests that dominant research on the creole history of Afrikaans – specifically, the Cape Muslim contribution to Afrikaans – has been overlooked (Davids 15). This oversight effectively amounted to cultural appropriation as the construction of Afrikaans as a ‘pure’ language with Dutch origins served the Afrikaner Nationalist project when the National Party came into power in 1948 and began to justify its plans to implement legislated apartheid. POC’s act of appropriating the denigrated term gamtaal in service of a Black Consciousness-inspired affirmation of colouredness, which they position as part of the black experience, thus points to alternative ways in which people of colour cand both express and define themselves in defiance of apartheid.Jansen’s work with the hip-hop theater project Afrikaaps reconceptualised gamtaal as Afrikaaps, a combination of the term Afrikaans and Kaaps. Kaaps means from the Cape – as in Cape Town (the city) or the Cape Flats, which is where many people classified as coloured were forcibly relocated under the Group Areas Act under apartheid (cf. McDonald; Salo; Alim and Haupt). Taking its cue from POC and Brasse vannie Kaap’s Mr FAT, who asserted that “gamtaal is legal” (Haupt, “Black Thing” 176), the Afrikaaps cast sang, “Afrikaaps is legal” (Afrikaaps). Conclusion: Agency and the Transportability of Mobile MatricesJansen pursues this line of thought by contending that the construction of Shaka Zulu’s kingdom involved mixing many tribes (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”), thereby alluding to arguments that narratives about Shaka Zulu were developed in service of Zulu nationalism to construct Zulu identity as bounded and fixed (Harries 105). Such constructions were essential to the apartheid state's justifications for establishing Bantustans, separate homelands established along the lines of clearly defined and differentiated ethnic identities (Harries 105). Writing about the use of myths and symbols during apartheid, Patrick Harries argues that in Kwazulu, “the governing Inkatha Freedom Party ... created a vivid and sophisticated vision of the Zulu past” (Harries 105). Likewise, Emile YX? contends that isiXhosa’s clicks come from the Khoi (Emile YX? “Mix en Meng It Op”; Afrikaaps). Hence, the idea of the Khoi San’s lineage and history as being separate from that of other African communities in Southern Africa is challenged. He thus challenges the idea of pure Zulu or Xhosa identities and drives the point home by sampling traditional Zulu music, as opposed to conventional hip-hop beats.Effectively, colonial strategies of tribalisation as a divide and rule strategy through the reification of linguistic and cultural practices are challenged, thereby reminding us of the “transportability of mobile matrices” and “fluidity of identities” (Alim 104, 105). In short, identities as well as cultural and linguistic practices were never bounded and static, but always-already hybrid, being constantly made and remade in a series of negotiations. This perspective is in line with research that demonstrates that race is socially and politically constructed and discredits biologically essentialist understandings of race (Yudell 13-14; Tattersall and De Salle 3). This is not to ignore the asymmetrical relations of power that enable cultural appropriation and racism (Hart 138), be it in the context of legislated apartheid, colonialism or in the age of corporate globalisation or Empire (cf. Haupt, Static; Hardt & Negri). But, even here, as Alim suggests, one should not underestimate the agency of subjects on the local level to produce alternative forms of expression and self-representation.ReferencesAdhikari, Mohamed. "The Sons of Ham: Slavery and the Making of Coloured Identity." South African Historical Journal 27.1 (1992): 95-112.Alim, H. Samy “Translocal Style Communities: Hip Hop Youth as Cultural Theorists of Style, Language and Globalization”. Pragmatics 19.1 (2009):103-127. Alim, H. Samy, and Adam Haupt. “Reviving Soul(s): Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the U.S. & South Africa”. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice. Ed. Django Paris and H. Samy Alim. 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